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 wander around paying the barest lip service to heteronormativity and get away with it (Wilde sadly didn’t get away with it, but you know what I mean).
But as the production wears on, and the anachronisms (swearing, pop songs) stack up, the less it feels like Webster is actually addressing the society Earnest was written in.
Certainly his acid-bright take doesn’t ‘make sense’ narratively. If it’s impossible to believe Algernon and Jack are straight – or even bi – it’s also impossible to grasp why exactly they’re going to such elaborate lengths to bag Cecily (Eliza Scanlen) and Gwendolen (Ronkę Adékoluéjó). Nobody actually seems attracted to anyone – apart from the two women to each other – and in this riotously colourful take on Victorian England there doesn’t seem to be any particular social imperative for anyone to settle down with a member of the opposite sex. But if the leads are written as subtextually queer, then Webster’s approach is essentially to crank up the subtext to 11 and not worry about every aspect of internal logic so long as we’re having a good time.
Which we very much are: handing the story over to its own cackling id and an ensemble of very beautiful, very charismatic, very funny actors, this Earnest could stand to be 15 minutes shorter but is otherwise a pure blast. Gatwa is supremely enjoyable as agent of chaos Algy, but it’s full of standout turns: I loved the great Sharon D Clarke as a twinkly, pragmatic Caribbean-accented Lady Bracknell and Scanlen as a somewhat feral Cecily.
One throwaway sight gag about rimming aside, it’s not a horny production, because fundamental to The Importance of Being Earnest is that it’s not a horny play. Indeed, it’s ultimately inseparable from the baggage of the repressed society it was written for – which is probably why most directors don’t try at all. Webster pushes it pretty far, but like a queer Vladimir and Estragon, Algy and Jack can never truly leave the closet, because there’s no mechanism in the text for them to do so – a late plot twist pretty much puts paid to coupling them up; you can’t cleverly reinterpret it so it’s not a a story about them pursuing women.
The Importance of Being Earnest wouldn't be The Importance of Being Earnest were it not on some level closeted. But what Webster has done here is create a veritable Narnia of a closet, a fantasy world as dazzlingly Technicolor as Judy Garland’s Oz. Why would anyone trade a closet this glorious for the painful grit of real life?
