Review of Oscar Wilde's play in the West End, with Stephen Fry as Lady Bracknell

Lest you be in any doubt of the queer coding long assumed to lie beneath Oscar Wilde’s comedy of secret alternate lives, the National Theatre production of The Importance Of Being Earnest now recast and transferred to the West End, puts it ostentatiously front and centre.

The show sets out its stall immediately, with It’s A Sin star Olly Alexander as Algenon draped across a grand piano in a lavish pink ballgown as a decadent dance number breaks out around him. High camp is clearly the order of the day, which is perfectly apt for a show that’s all about taking the frivolous very seriously. 

Everyone here has their inviolable social rules, none more so than the formidably snooty Lady Bracknell, a role the stentorian Stephen Fry, a Wilde expert who’s played the great playwright on screen, seems born into, despite some prior complaints about a male actor taking a great female role. The erstwhile QI host certainly dominates the stage with his physical presence and a bustle the size of Hampshire, making Augusta’s displeasure at the skittish shenanigans of her wayward nephew Algy and his chum Jack Worthing very apparent.

The boys are more flirtatious with each other than they are with the girls they are pursuing for the sake of propriety. Likewise the attraction between Jack’s intended, Gwendolen (Kitty Hawthorne) and Algenon’s muse Cecily (Jessica Whitehurst) is made explicit after a passive-aggressive high tea turns into slapstick with an increasing sexually charge.

It’s one of many delicious physical comedy touches added by director Max Webster. The brilliant, hilarious Hayley Carmichael steals every scene as the servants Lane and, especially, Merriman, always befuddled as to which direction he should be facing. Gwendolen’s struggles to negotiate even the slightest slope in Jack’s country garden is another stupidly funny aside.

Amid all this high-spirited playfulness, the script’s carefully arch, mannered lines can feel laboured, almost like a parody of Wildean bon mots. ’One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them,’ for instance, in an uncharacteristically lacklustre exchange between Jack and Algenon that is cheekily acknowledged to exist only to cover a scene change. That it’s so noticeable when the energy flags underlines how buoyant the show is everywhere else.

The humour here is not subtle, but Alexander handles it lightly, wonderfully flippant in his role, although Nathan Stewart-Jarrett is a little less natural, tending to oversell his lines as Jack, even in a show in which ‘over-the-top’ is a mantra. The female leads, especially Hawthorne, also do well to flesh out their characters to become more than mere baubles to be collected by the men to meet their societal expectations.

Given his celebrity, Hugh Dennis has a relatively minor role as the fastidious man of the cloth Rev Chasuble (with a welcome touch of ‘milky-milky’ creepiness) in a chaste romantic pairing with governess Miss Prism, played by Coronation Street and Dinnerladies star Shobna Gulati.

The sets and costumes – especially a Mardi Gras-style curtain-call – are suitably opulent and there’s the occasional Bridgerton-style use of modern musical snippets, all part of the production’s self-awareness. The exuberance and irreverence Wilde would surely have approved of provides plenty of uncomplicated enjoyment.

• The Importance Of Being Earnest is at the Nöel Coward Theatre until January 10. Tickets

Review date: 1 Oct 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett