The Importance of Being Earnest
Describing Oscar Wilde’s most famous play as ‘camp’ is a bit like describing water as ‘a liquid’. Hell yes it’s camp - Wilde’s story of two wisecracking bachelors getting into insanely complicated hijinks in the nominal name of the pursuit of women is frivolous, absurd and about as heterosexual as Jonathan Bailey’s turn in the movie Wicked.
And yet it has to be said that Max Webster’s production is – by any reasonable standards – unusually, prodigiously, extremely gay. Current Doctor Who leading man Ncuti Gatwa plays Algernon – one of said bachelors – and begins the show in a pink ballgown, miming playing piano while the rest of the cast dance around him in matching black tie and moustaches. And things do not get noticeably straighter.
On a set from Rae Smith that looks like a lysergically enhanced take on rep production cliche – the garden scene has a kind of Midsommar vibe – Algernon and his BFF Jack (Hugh Skinner) are played as gay men, as opposed to the usual ‘witty and English’. Okay, being flamboyant, effeminate and sharply dressed doesn’t necessarily mean anything about anyone’s sexuality, but this production is not exactly subtle: early on Algernon bursts into hysterical laughter when Kean’s more guileless Jack suggests that he’s thinking of getting married to a woman.
The first act landed me with the idea that maybe this is what it was like to be gay in Victorian England, where an absence of mainstream queer culture meant figures like, say Oscar Wilde could...
