The Importance of Being Earnest review

Rae Smith’s design of a faux gilded proscenium arch, topped with a plaster moulding of a bouquet of decidedly phallic vegetables, features a red velvet curtain that slices between scenes, lest we forget that nothing we’re watching is real. Ncuti Gatwa’s Algernon, sleek and gleeful as a cat licking cream off its whiskers, makes his first appearance in a hot-pink ballgown, simulating a Dr Dre track on piano while striking poses; the country manor house of Hugh Skinner’s fidgety, sulky Jack has an astroturf lawn with Disneyish oversized flowers against an improbably blue sky.

These two frolicking bachelors seem more interested in each other than in the women they set out to wed, which lends a slightly alarming twist to the familial revelations of the final scene; and the bitchy tea-table spat between Eliza Scanlan’s brattish Cecily and Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́’s mischievously assertive Gwendolen spirals into erotic excitement. Both women are overtly sexually charged, Adékọluẹ́jọ́ devouring the contents of Jack’s trousers with her wide eyes; for the men, the marriages seem to be more a matter of economic and social convenience.

Presiding over it all, Sharon D Clarke’s Lady Bracknell is a formidable Caribbean matriarch, her withering putdowns delivered with lethal elegance; her delivery of the infamous “A handbag?” line is refreshingly understated, yet dripping with disdain. There’s vivid support from Julian Bleach as a pair of cadaverous manservants, and from Richard Cant’s Canon Chasuble and Amanda Lawrence’s schoolteacher Miss Prism, both of them so quivering with repressed desire that they can barely trust themselves to be in the same room. The prevailing air of unreality means that, for all its nudge-nudge naughtiness, the production is more sweet and silly than it is sexy. But it has a celebratory sense of fun, carried off in style.