WHAT'S left to say about Oscar Wilde's most successful play? Nothing, save to remind those few who have never seed it that it is one of the most perfectly crafted comedies about style and artifice in theatrical history.

Here is an occasion to welcome Patrick Mason's decision to restore it to the repertoire of the National Theatre Society, and to admire the stylishness which he, as director, has imposed upon this production. One is made aware of the style as soon as one sees Francis O'Connor's elegant spare pale blue setting thrusting from the proscenium arch. But equally evident is the difficulty of subsequently changing that style to suit the more rustic elements of the out of town scenes in the later acts of the drama.

And so, to a certain extent, it turns out. It is as if the director has been so seduced by the style of artifice that he has sacrificed some of the characterisation of the real people beneath the style that should make the artifice satirically funny.

Thus Earnest and Algernon, and Gwendolyn and Lady Bracknell (all of them admirably counterpointed by Des Cave's alert butler Lane) gallop through the first act as if there were no reality beyond their artifice, although strenuous efforts are made to try to make the well known aphorisms sound fresh and part of the gallop may have been a merely first night phenomenon.

But the same style is then apparently enforced on the second act where the rural garden setting is entirely visually unconvincing and young Cecily, trapped in the same artifice, cannot successfully puncture the pretensions of city society. Blessedly, Harry Towb's distractedly committed Canon Chasuble and Doreen Keogh's fluttering Miss Prism, break through the stylistic mode to register the most rounded characterisations of the evening.

Frank McCusker's Earnest does not manage to break through until the third act and Darragh Kelly's calculating Algy never quite gets out of the stylistic construct of the production. Alison McKenna's Gwendolyn and Dawn Bradfield's Cecily remain trapped in artifice throughout, while Rosaleen Linehan's Lady Bracknell (upon whose unrelenting artifice the comedy depends, save when broken through by mercenary concerns) creates one of the more original Bracknells of our times except that, in her efforts to change the emphases of the familiar speeches, she sometimes allows the words to lapse into inaudibility. But maybe that was a first night phenomenon also.