This production of A Woman of No Importance moves the action from the 1890s to the 1950s, which makes the drama surrounding an illegitimate son even less believable than it was when it originally premiered.David Cooper
The conventional wisdom about A Woman of No Importance is that it is the weakest of Oscar Wilde's best-known works – and Eda Holmes's new production at the Shaw Festival is conventional enough to keep that impression intact.
Despite a transfer of the action from the 1890s to the 1950s – and partly because of it – Wilde's melodrama stapled to a comedy of manners appears dreary and dated.
The 1893 play begins on an estate called Hunstanton Chase – where Lady Hunstanton (Fiona Reid) has assembled a collection of lords and ladies for the evening.
Chief among them is Lord Illingworth (Martin Happer) – deemed "very, very wicked" by many in society and therefore drowning in dinner invitations. "It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true," he says.
Amid such badinage, there are two thin plots afoot. In one, a tame riff on Dangerous Liaisons, Lord Illingworth is challenged by Mrs. Allonby (an alluringly immoral Diana Donnelly) to kiss a very young and very puritanical American in their midst named Miss Worsley (Julia Course).
In the other, Lord Illingworth has, somewhat out of character, hired a young man of modest background named Gerald Arbuthnot (Wade Bogert-O'Brien) to be his secretary – and Gerald's mother is set to come over to meet her son's new employer after dinner.
When Mrs. Arbuthnot (Fiona Byrne) finally shows up, the cynical witticisms are overwhelmed by the melodrama – as she turns out to be the woman who Lord Illingworth got pregnant 20 years earlier, but would not marry.
Mrs. Arbuthnot wants to prevent her son from working for his supposedly wicked father – but holds off on explaining why, as she fears her son will turn against her upon learning of his illegitimacy. It takes a long act of beating around the bush for the truth to come out – and then another for everyone involved to accept that maybe they aren't as awful as all that.
It's easy to make fun of A Woman of No Importance's overwrought plot and "oh, child of my shame!" exclamations now – and, indeed, it was back in the 1890s, too. Wilde seemed to mock himself in a more enduring play that premiered two years later called The Importance of Being Earnest when Jack comes to believe – for a moment – that his mother is the unwed Miss Prism.
"Unmarried!" he says, shocked. "I do not deny that is a serious blow! But after all, who has the right to cast a stone against one who has suffered? Cannot repentance wipe out an act of folly? Why should there be one law for men and another for women? Mother, I forgive you."
That is the action of A Woman of No Importance, summarized and satirized in a single speech.
If A Woman of No Importance is to work as a 2 1/2-hour drama on stage, care must be taken to create a world in which illegitimacy can truly be believed as a legitimate issue. Holmes, however, has made that harder by moving the action from 1893 to 1951.
This six-decade jump allows for Michael Gianfrancesco to create 1950s costumes that are very eye-catching (though his set is somewhat diminished by appearing to have being inspired by shower curtains).
And it allows for the incorporation of photography – a minor character played by Jim Mezon appears regularly to snap pictures of the ladies – that permits Holmes to emphasize the performativity of the upper-class world that Wilde was depicting, and link it to our own Instagram age.
But the time warp also makes a rather serious hash of the plot – as the Legitimacy Law passed by the British Parliament in 1926 altered the rules of the game and make Gerald in the final act seem either self-serving or ignorant.
With the double standard applied to women and men's sexual histories hardly dead, I did not find it impossible to understand that Mrs. Arbuthnot might be mired in shame over having had a child out of wedlock – and found it only slightly more difficult to understand that the young church-going characters of Gerald and Miss Worsley's believe that shame extended to bastards as well.
What I did find hard to accept was that these characters – with their limited sympathy for themselves and others – should be the ones I was to root for and that Lord Illingworth's rather sensible and repeated offers of child support should be seen as somehow beyond the pale.
Holmes's production questions these characters too little – it is particularly unpersuasive because of a lacklustre, weak-voiced performance by Byrne and a somewhat withered Wildean one by Happer, who delivers the play's famous epigrams with an unpleasant smugness. On the opening night, the audience laughed frequently at the play's contrivances. That's not the type of comedy Wilde intended.