Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✭✭✭
by Oscar Wilde, directed by Eda Holmes
Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
June 25-October 29, 2016
Lord Illingworth: “Duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself”
Critical opinion takes the view that A Woman of No Importance is the least of Wilde’s four full-length plays. Anyone seeing the Shaw Festival’s current production would find that view very hard to agree with. Insightful director Eda Holmes has found a way to make the play work so well on stage that it seems equally as good as Lady Windermere’s Fan or An Ideal Husband and, strangely enough, it feels more modern than either. Add to that wonderfully detailed acting from a superb cast and A Woman of No Importance is yet another play at the Shaw Festival that should not be missed.
The reason why critics give Woman a low ranking is the claim that Wilde does not begin the central plot until the second of the four acts. Act 1 seems to be taken up entirely with the idle banter of the guests gathered at Lady Hunstanton’s country house that leads nowhere in particular. We learn that visiting American heiress Hester Worsley does not much like English society, except for Gerald Arbuthnot, and that Gerald Arbuthnot, a humble bank clerk who quite likes Hester, has been chosen by the notorious yet popular Lord Illingworth to be his private secretary. Act 2 introduces us to Rachel Arbuthnot, Gerald’s mother, whom Lady Hunstanton has invited over. When Lord Illingworth saw her note in reply to Lady Hunstanton’s invitation, he had called the writer “a woman of no importance”. In Act 2 we discover that Gerald’s father is none other than Lord Illingworth, the man who refused to marry Rachel after Gerald was born. The question is whether Rachel will tell her son who his father is in order to explain why she objects so strongly to his accepting a position with Lord Illingworth. And, if she does, what the outcome will be.
The mistake most people make in either reading or directing the play is to try to force it to be The Importance of Being Earnest. To do this emphasizes the epigrammatic speeches of the upper class characters like Lord Illingworth and his female equivalent Lady Allonby which makes the serious plot concerning Mrs. Arbuthnot seems secondary and out of place. In fact, Earnest is the only one of Wilde’s full-length plays that does not have a serious plot at it heart. Instead of viewing the serious plot as an error, people can come to a far better understanding of Wilde and his plays if they try to see how the scenes of Earnest-like wit are related to those of the serious story.
Holmes discovers, as did Peter Hinton with Lady Windermere’s Fan in 2013, that while the Earnest-like sections may be very funny they are also a scathing satire on the prejudices, hypocrisy and mindless preoccupations of the British upper class. In this light Act 1 in Holmes’s production does not seem superfluous to the action at all. In fact, it establishes a general structure that goes beyond the Mrs. Arbuthnot-Lord Illingworth plot. That structure concerns an outsider critically observing the doings of the upper class, suffering harm from it and finally abjuring it entirely.
In term of the play’s action the first person to undergo this journey which begins with the very start of Act 1, is the American Miss Worsley. Though constantly condemned as a “Puritan”, Miss Worsley is the one who most trenchantly and without humour condemns the British class system, the upper class abhorrence of work and the immorality of Lord Illingworth and Lady Allonby. Wilde demonstrates that Miss Worsley is right to condemn the last two since they maliciously hatch a plot to see if Lord Illingworth can seduce Miss Worsley.
When Mrs. Arbuthnot appears in Act 2, Holmes makes us realize that she is the second of the two outsiders in the play. She has been harmed in a worse way than Miss Worsley will be by triflings and prejudice from the upper class and has withdrawn herself from it. Holmes links the two women by placing them in sequence far upstage left where they observe the actions of society people downstage. While the Mrs. Arbuthnot-Lord Illingworth plot is central, it is part of a larger story of those who see through the corruption of society and find a way to leave it behind. If the first three acts of the play show Miss Worsley and Mrs. Arbuthnot as outsiders in relation to British society, in Act 4 the situation is reversed when the setting changes from Lady Hunstanton’s manor to Mrs. Arbuthnot’s small house.
Fiona Byrne is such a sympathetic Mrs. Arbuthnot that people literally applaud when she finally triumphs over Lord Illingworth. Byrne shows us that despite Mrs. Arbuthnot’s diffident appearance and manner, she is the strongest, most courageous character in the play. Nevertheless, we feel for her as she wavers when weighing what she wants versus what is right for her son. Byrne is such a masterful actor that she delivers Mrs. Arbuthnot’s long speech to Gerald about a mother’s love with such conviction that it wipes away any stain of sentimentality.
Wade Bogert-O’Brien is especially good as Gerald. He has a knack for playing intense but naive young men and that is exactly what Gerald is. Julia Course is a fine Hester Worsley. Neither Holmes nor Course makes the mistake of taking the others’ critique of Hester as a Puritan literally. Course makes clear that Hester is so uncomfortable with British society because it so smugly tolerates hypocrisy and idleness. Other than Mrs. Arbuthnot, all the British characters we meet, including Gerald, are impressed with Lord Illingworth’s wealth, power and wit without caring much about his morality. It’s no surprise that Hester finds Mrs. Arbuthnot the only sensible woman at Lady Hunstanton’s manor. When Illingworth makes a pass at Hester, Course plays it absolutely seriously.
Illingworth’s female equivalent is Lady Allonby, who, although, married, follows his pattern of flirtation with individuals while denouncing the sex in general. Diana Donnelly has not had the chance to play quite such a nasty, dangerous character before and she is riveting. In her long speech against men, Donnelly gives us the impression Lady Allonby is not so much speaking her mind as revelling in her own wittiness.
Fiona Reid has played any number of eccentric women, such as Judith Bliss in Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, so she is right at home as Lady Hunstanton and very funny. Lady Hunstanton complains that she is losing her memory and often confuses the trivial and serious reasons for a person’s behaviour. Reid’s timing and delivery are as precise as ever, but what she adds to the character is the feeling that, underneath all the confusion, she is a good judge of character. When Illingworth spouts particularly contrarian views of life or people, Lady Hunstanton will say, “What do you mean?” or “I don’t understand a word”. After Lady Allonby’s tirade against men, she exclaims, “How clever you are, my dear! You never mean a single word you say”. Reid gives these remarks such an edge that we come to believe Lady Hunstanton is not as blind to reality as she seems.
Given the self-absorption of Lady Allonby, the admiration for her of the mousy Lady Stutfield as played so well by Claire Jullien is all the more humorous. Mary Haney plays the old-fashioned Lady Pontefract as a precursor of Earnest’s Lady Bracknell in being easily scandalized by anything new or un-British. The fact that Lady Pontefract is so jealous of her harmless husband, delightfully played by Jim Mezon as a man in his second childhood, provides a fine comic counterpoint to the theme of marriage.
Holmes and designer Michael Gianfrancesco have moved the action forward from 1893 to the 1950s, probably the last decade where a generally accepted code of morality was in force. This has the positive effect not just of allowing Gianfrancesco to design a wide array of gorgeous gowns, but of making the play seem far less removed from us. Indeed, the idea of men who are wealthy, popular, powerful or all three, taking advantage of women and silencing them has hardly disappeared from current new headlines. While we might not say a woman is “ruined” as they would in Wilde’s day, women still hesitate to come forward about sexual or physical abuse and women are still blamed for encouraging that abuse.
By not trivializing the serious aspects of the play, by portraying Lord Illingworth despite his allure and boundless wit as an supercilious cad, Holmes has discovered exactly the right way to stage Wilde’s play so that it has the greatest impact. To reclaim a play deemed a “lesser” work is no minor task and Holmes and her entire dedicated cast deserve unreserved praise for such a brilliant and important achievement.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Martin Happer as Lord Illingworth and Fiona Byrne as Mrs. Arbuthnot; Wade Bogert-O’Brien as Gerald and Julia Course as Hester; Wade Bogert-O’Brien as Gerald and Martin Happer as Lord Illingworth. ©2016 David Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.
2016-08-12
A Woman of No Importance