Lady Windermere's Fan Gate Theatre, DublinTake out a dozen scintillating lines, and, if you were told that Lady Windermere's Fan was written by a decent but now largely unperformed Victorian playwright such as Arthur Pinero, you would have no trouble believing it.
Along with An Ideal Husband and A Woman of No Importance, it is the least Wildean of Wilde's works. These plays were written before Wilde's glorious discovery, with The Importance of Being Earnest, that the only way to treat Victorian plots was to explode them into absurdity. It is no great stretch to imagine the plot of Lady Windermere's Fan, albeit in a less economical form, as that of Miss Prism's lost 13-volume novel in Earnest. The pre-cooked epigrams may add a savoury sauce, but they are poured over a pretty dry old bird.
A serious attack on moral absolutism is processed through an awkward mixture of melodrama and farce, with threats of blackmail, mysterious assignations, would-be lovers hiding behind the curtains and even what used to be called a McGuffin (a largely irrelevant object introduced for the sole purpose of driving the plot) - in this case, the eponymous fan.
Even the play's serious point is hard to make now. The plot depends on two assumptions that the audience has to share. One is that there is no worse fate than being rejected by the upper-class twits who make up Society - hence the mysterious Mrs Erlynne (Ingrid Craigie) is using her secret hold over Lord Windermere (Mark O'Halloran) to force him to introduce her into their company. The other is that everyone believes in a rigid morality in which people are either good or bad, and that in using his own wonderful way with paradox to undermine this assumption, Wilde is telling us something shocking. In the 21st century, when few share either of these assumptions, it is very difficult to recreate the world in which most did.
This, presumably, is why Alan Stanford decided, for his Gate production, to shift the action from 1892, when the play was first performed, to 1947. Yet, if the intention is to make the story more immediate, the effect is to make it less so. Peter O'Brien's gorgeous costumes and Eileen Diss's sumptuous sets may suggest the 1940s, and some of the incidentals - the radio in Lord Darlington's room, changing "my carriage" to "my driver" - do likewise. But mostly the shift merely creates bizarre anachronisms. Can we really believe that Mrs Erlynne "drives her ponies in the park every afternoon" amidst the blitzed-out austerity of post-war London? Did the Hooray Henry set still meet at parties "at the Foreign Office", now run by a Labour government? And the Duchess of Berwick's suggestion that Lady Windermere take her husband "to Homburg or to Aix" conjures up a surreal image of the pair of them relaxing amid the ruins of a devastated continent. The transposition needs to be either made far more thorough or dropped altogether.
This matters, however, only to the degree to which it implies a deep uncertainty about whether or not to attempt a recreation of Victorian upper-class mores. To the extent that Stanford's production tries to do so, it becomes enmeshed in a strained artificiality. Katie Kirby as Lady Windermere suffers most in this regard. Tied up in a straitjacket of strangulated vowels, she comes across as terribly, awfully priggish.
When, on the other hand, the actors are allowed to escape these constraints and take a more playful and sardonic approach to their characters, the production is immensely enlivened. Caitriona Ní Mhurchu's Duchess, for example, leaps forward to Earnest and kidnaps Lady Bracknell to delicious effect. Michael James Ford's Lord Augustus is a richly detailed and funny caricature of a permanently baffled old buffer whose dead brain cells have nourished the rosy alcoholic bloom on his cheeks. Elizabeth Moynihan is a Sloane Ranger up on a high horse of bitchiness. And Ingrid Craigie as Mrs Erlynne refuses to be distracted by questions about the appropriate mannerisms of a would-be society lady and gets on with a vivid portrayal of a smart woman toughened up by life. The energy of these performances and the snappy pace of Stanford's production do much to drown out the creaking noises the plot makes.
Runs until Jul 16
