The Importance of Being Earnest

David Suchet already has an OBE and a CBE, but is not yet a knight, which would enable him to be a sir. But he has overnight become one of the most celebrated theatrical ladies in the canon, Lady Augusta Bracknell, in a lavishly appointed West End revival of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

It introduces a frisson of novelty for an (over) familiar play, though it’s not the first time this has been done: back in 1987, drag comedy duo Hinge and Bracket did the play at the Whitehall, with Bracket playing Lady Bracknell and Hinge Miss Prism. More recently, Geoffrey Rush and Brian Bedford played Lady Bracknell in Australia and Canada respectively, both in 2011, with the latter going on to transfer to Broadway where he was nominated for a Tony.

Suchet – with the attitude and determination of a battleship sailing into choppy waters – sets his face and body in full gorgon battleaxe mould, and makes a harsh but convincing portrait that feels in equal parts Margaret Thatcher and Patricia Routledge.

In a theatrical landscape where roles for mature older women are short on the ground, it may be a little perverse to give the challenge to a man, not least one who is best known for heavy and/or tragic roles, not his comic ones. But once disbelief is suspended – as it must be in any case for the convoluted coincidences of this play – it doesn’t so much disrupt as extend the play’s ready embrace of extremities in its quaint portrait of high society life.

Meticulously cut cucumber sandwiches are just one item on a checklist of fawning eccentricities of which the play sometimes makes heavy satiric work.

“We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces,” is one of Lady Bracknell’s more resonant bons mots, more pertinent than ever today, as she submits Imogen Doel’s Cecily Cardew to a close visual inspection. Adrian Noble’s strongly cast production digs below the play’s own surfaces, particularly in Michele Dotrice’s lonely Miss Prism and the excitement she feels when Richard O’Callaghan’s Chasuble makes an appearance. It’s a lovely touch of real humanity among the playful artifice of Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncreiff’s courtings of Gwendolen Fairfax and Cecily Cardew, all appealingly played by Michael Benz, Philip Cumbus, Emily Barber and Imogen Doel respectively.

Peter McKintosh provides a series of picture postcard pretty environments which also maintain the production’s effortless straddling of reality and fantasy.