An Ideal Husband
Gate Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
Oscar Wilde was a snob who charmed his way into English high society. He was also a penetrating critic of snobbery, a socialist and a closeted gay man.
That doubleness lies at the heart of An Ideal Husband, his third drawingroom comedy and most political work, whose first production coincided with the playwright’s ill-fated libel action and arrest for “gross indecency” in 1895.
Marc Atkinson Borrull’s assured revival at the Gate Theatre both captures the mordant spirit of Wilde’s satire of Victorian hypocrisy and subtly evokes the ways in which the play anticipates its author’s downfall.
The action opens in a sumptuous London mansion, where the Liberal politician Sir Robert Chiltern and his wife are hosting a party. In a twist on Wilde’s stage directions, Kat Heath’s set features a sofa upholstered with scenes from the painter François Boucher’s erotically charged rococo fantasy The Triumph of Venus.
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It’s an apt symbol for a society struggling to conceal diverse forms of desire within a strict moral order.
The atmosphere of genteel idleness is disrupted by the arrival of Mrs Cheveley, a widowed diplomatic camp follower. As played by Caitríona Ennis, with her high-pitched vowels and lacquered hair, she initially cuts a vampish figure who seems determined to sow carnal chaos. But that coquettishness belies more ruthlessly practical designs as she proceeds to blackmail her host with an incriminating letter proving that he enriched himself by selling government secrets about the Suez Canal.
In Richard Flood’s portrayal, Sir Robert exudes phlegmatic, born-to-rule self-assurance (not unlike a Victorian David Cameron). We are left to savour the irony that the play’s straight man is the most crooked of the lot.
Mrs Cheveley’s price is that he publicly support a new, troubled canal scheme in Argentina, which has swallowed up her capital. Sir Robert is both appalled at the prospect of having to betray his tattered principles once more and fretful about the reaction of his puritanical wife.
As Lady Chiltern, Ayoola Smart does a fine job of conveying a certain blinkered Gladstonian moralism. But, lacking Mrs Cheveley’s ferocious guile and wit, the role feels a bit underwritten.
Salvation emerges in the unlikely shape of Sir Robert’s best friend, the vain and cynical layabout Viscount Goring. Initially at ease in his indolence, he becomes increasingly highly strung as Mrs Cheveley’s machinations gather steam. The subtext here – expertly conveyed by Matthew Malone, who displays impressive emotional range – lies in Goring’s implied homosexuality.
His distress at Sir Robert’s predicament turns Mrs Cheveley’s blackmail into an allegory for the threat of homosexual exposure.
The play’s unique power derives from the contrast between the happy comic denouement orchestrated by Goring and the tragic fate visited upon Wilde, who was unable to pull off a similar escape in the courtroom.
Atkinson Borrull’s staging adds a few contemporary flourishes, notably James McGlynn Seaver’s exuberant costumes, which blend Victorian dress with elements of late-20th-century couture. Mrs Cheveley’s shoes practically become characters in themselves. But this Ideal Husband remains fittingly haunted by the circumstances of its creation.
An Ideal Husband is at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, July 11th
