A Woman of no Importance

Gate Theatre, Dublin Until Sep 22 €25-€35 (students €15 Mon- Thurs) 01-8744045 gatetheatre.ie

However they may seem, nobody is entirely innocent in an Oscar Wilde play. That goes as much for the characters in his 1893 comedy of manners-cum-melodrama as it does for audience. For more than a century we have become accustomed to reading deeper into Wilde’s plays, just as his wit seems content to skitter across their surface.

A Woman of No Importance may not be as slyly coded (or nimbly plotted) as The Importance of Being Earnest, but they share several qualities – even some lines: “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his.”

Still, it would be reductive to present it as another allegory for Victorian subculture, where the dissolute Lord Illingworth, who discovers his new secretary is his illegitimate son, can be seen as a dandy intent on seducing a young man. Director Patrick Mason’s elegant solution is to be faithful to the play’s intentions through stylish display, where performers nudge at the artificiality of society.

Peter O’Brien’s costumes present morality as a sliding scale and Eileen Diss’s set hints at a threshold between insiders and outcasts; an appropriate space for Ingrid Craigie’s secretive Mrs Arnuthnot, as it is for the canny outsider Wilde.

Can't see that? Catch this:Jack Kairo and the Long Hard Kiss Goodbye, Theatre Upstairs, Dublin