Review

Belinda McKeon was at The Importance of Being Earnest in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.

Faced with a new production of this comedy of manners, what astonishes the viewer is the enduring sharpness of its wit. Over a century on, Wilde's rendering of the attempts of gads-about-town Algy and Jack to secure Gwendolyn and Cecily, the spoiled heiresses of their choosing, all under the acid-fired gaze of Lady Bracknell, is still genuinely and freshly funny. This much it had to be, for very utilitarian reasons, when the play was first written; Wilde knew that night after night of houses heaving with laughter was his quickest path to wealth. And while the prospect of box-office business at the beleaguered Abbey is hardly to be sniffed at, the obligation, in Conall Morrison's production, to keep the humour of Earnest gleefully alive veers in precisely the same direction as it did in 1895. That is, it veers firmly towards the importance of being Oscar.

Just as Wilde wrote Earnest to serve himself, so Morrison's restaging attempts to serve both as a homage to and an exploration of the playwright, by bringing out the themes which relate most obviously and in some ways most poignantly to Wilde's own life. Morrison adds a prologue of his own writing - based on the biography of Frank Harris - which depicts Alan Stanford's fine realisation of Wilde in a Parisian bar near the end of his life, penniless and scorned, still blindly in love with the young men who deride him.

Written both in English and in French, the prologue succeeds less through weaving a narrative out of Wildean epigrams (although that is amusing) than in its establishment of the slightly eerie atmosphere which will invade the play. In its brevity, however, it can achieve little of what Morrison intends for it. Its troupe of old friends, enemies and advantage-takers are onstage for such a short time that it is difficult to grasp exactly what occurs, and what is revealed to us about Wilde, when the playwright chooses to cast his comedy from among their number; his subtle system of vengeance and reward becomes too subtle to discern.

The same cannot be said of Morrison's drawing-out of the homoerotic resonances of Wilde's famously double-speaking play. He tries to makes a virtue out of blatancy, and while the lens he holds up to Wilde's layers often proves a thought-provoking one, its battle with the sheer comedy of Earnest is never quite won.

It is hardly a new way to see Wilde, but it is a more forceful grappling with that way, and Morrison's all-male cast succeed superbly. Stanford as Lady Bracknell, Tadhg Murphy as Gwendolyn and Patrick Moy as Cecily are marvellously comic and yet strangely affecting. Less complexity, but equal smartness are provided, meanwhile, by Darragh Kelly and Alan Smyth (a flawless understudy of the ill Andrew Bennett) as Jack and Algy, though Ned Dennehy's brilliantly idiosyncratic interpretation of Canon Chasuble is the surprising highlight of the male parts.

Sabine Dargent's surreally colourful set, a riot of tiffany lamps and stained glass panels, encroaches like a nightmare, but aptly so - the unbearable wallpaper of Wilde's dying phrase comes to mind - in this dark-tinged take on a world that could so easily seem all light and air.

Runs until Sept 24