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by Oscar Wilde, directed by Lezlie Wade

Stratford Festival, Avon Theatre, Stratford

May 31-October 28, 2018

     Gertrude: Lord Goring, you are talking quite seriously.

     Lord Goring: You must forgive me, Lady Chiltern. It won't occur again.

     Gertrude: No, I like you to be serious.

The Stratford Festivals new production of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband is certainly an improvement on the Festival’s previous production in 2007, but director Lezlie Wade has not found a clear way of creating an harmonious whole of the play’s combination of comedy and melodrama.  So far the only production I have seen that succeeded in this task was Jackie Maxwell’s production of the play for the Shaw Festival in 2010.  That production revealed both the play and its characters to be far more subtle than does the present Stratford production.

Oscar Wilde’s best known play may be The Importance of Being Earnest, which is purely comic and epigrammatic from beginning to end, but that play, however, is actually atypical of his work.  His three other full-length plays – Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893) and An Ideal Husband (1895) – all share a mixture of satire and melodrama that modern directors find difficult to reconcile.  The solution that Jackie Maxwell discovered can be found in one of Wilde’s own sayings –  “The first duty in life is to assume a pose”.  This is a maxim that Wilde followed in his own life since the epigram-spouting, dandelion-wearing dandy was merely a pose Wilde adopted in public in order to keep his private self hidden.

An Ideal Husband has characters who are wholly serious like Sir Robert Chiltern (Tim Campbell), a respected member of the House of Commons, and his wife, Lady Gertrude Chiltern (Sophia Walker).  It also has characters who are primarily satirical like Mabel Chiltern (Zara Jestadt), Sir Robert’s sister, and Lord Arthur Goring (Brad Hodder), Robert and Gertrude’s best friend.  There is also a key character who is both witty and serious, the devious Mrs. Cheveley (Bahareh Yaraghi), once an enemy of Lady Chiltern’s at school, once a fiancée of Lord Goring and once the lover of Baron Arnheim, Sir Robert’s mentor.

Mrs. Cheveley’s plot is to force the virtuous Sir Robert to back a fraudulent business venture in Parliament which will be all to her own gain.  If he does not, she will reveal that his present wealth derives from investing in the Suez Canal using insider information before it was made public.  Since Gertrude regards Robert as an  “ideal husband”, if Cheveley exposes him it will not only

ruin him politically and financially but also break up his marriage.  But Mrs. Cheveley, who is already wealthy, has another object.  Knowing that Lord Goring is Sir Robert’s best friend, she assumes that rather than see his friend ruined, he will offer to marry her and if he does she will destroy the incriminating document she has against Sir Robert.

Where Stratford’s current production fails is in not looking deeply enough into the characters of Lord Goring and Mrs. Cheveley.  Director Lezlie Wade falls into the common trap in directing one of Wilde’s non-Earnest plays of trying to make the entire play comic like Earnest even though it obviously is not.  Lord Goring may be the most Earnest-like character in the play through his constant displays of epigrammatic wit, but there has to be more to him than that or else how could he be Sir Robert and Lady Chiltern’s most trusted friend.  Similarly, if Mrs. Cheveley’s ultimate goal is not wealth but Lord Goring’s love, simple villainy is not enough to explain why she should embark on so complex a way of winning him back.

Unfortunately, Wade’s direction gives us only a superficial view of both characters.  Neither acquires the richness they had in the Shaw’s 2010 production and as a result the entire play suffers.

Brad Hodder, who has given fine performances in many previous plays at Stratford, shows a fine flair for physical comedy but he seems to have been directed to speak all his lines in the same over-emphatic manner, whether comic or not, as if that artificial form of delivery will somehow make them funnier.  It doesn’t.  In fact, Hodder’s unvarying verbal delivery is soon tiresome.  Since Wade treats Lord Goring as if he were actually the superficial, amoral ne’er-do-well that he pretends to be, it makes it difficult so see what Sir Robert and Gertrude see in him.  In fact, Lord Goring cannot be as amoral as he makes out since the play shows that he is the one who sets a trap to catch Mrs. Cheveley and thus save his friends.  Hodder is certainly capable of playing  multilayered characters.  It’s a pity then that Wade has sapped this Lord Goring of his potential complexity.

Wade’s approach also eliminates the complexity in Mrs. Cheveley.  Instead of realizing that there is a certain desperation that has driven Mrs. Cheveley to undertake so elaborate a plot to win back Lord Goring, Wade takes the simplistic view that Mrs. Cheveley is simply a villain.  Bahareh Yaraghi is excellent at making Mrs. Cheveley a seductively feline embodiment of self-confident malevolence.  But, as the Shaw’s 2010 production illustrated, there is much more to the character that Wade simply doesn’t see.  Moya O’Connell gave us the sense that Mrs. Cheveley knew she was playing a dangerous game so that her use of wit was a means of hiding her fear.  And why, too, has Mrs. Cheveley been a

thief from childhood on?  Is it simply villainy or is it envy of the stability and respectability she can never have?  O’Connell was encouraged to intimate the latter and the character and the play were the stronger for it.

Tim Campbell is a fine Robert Chiltern.  He admirably coveys the war between anger at Mrs. Cheveley and his own personal guilt.  It’s too bad Wade decides to have him mug his embarrassment to the audience when Gertrude lavishes praise on him as her model of perfection. 

Sophia Walker is very good as Gertrude Chiltern.  She shows that for all her poise and keen judgement of other people’s character, Gertrude had a blind spot, due to her unwavering love, in judging her own husband.  It’s too bad that Wade decides to give her a comic moment too in hyperventilating excessively before admitting that she had told a lie.  It’s always a sign of lack of insight when a director tries to force the serious moments of a comedy also to be comic.

In other roles, Zara Jestadt is a delight as Miss Mabel Chiltern, the female counterpart to Lord Goring who is as adept as he is in assuming a pose of triviality.  Joseph Ziegler is very funny as Lord Goring’s father Lord Caversham, who constantly upbraids his son for his triviality.  One wonders, in fact, if Lord Goring has adopted his pose of triviality exactly because it vexes his father.  Marion Adler could be quite amusing as the formidable Lady Markby except that Wade has her deliver all her lines in the same over-emphatic manner that Lord Goring does, as if over-emphasis made epigrammatic wit funnier instead of the opposite. 

Set designer Douglas Paraschuk and costume designer Patrick Clark have given the production a sumptuous period look as if the Chilterns had lived in Downton Abbey in the 1890s before the Crawleys.  People new to the play and expecting another Importance of Being Earnest will be disappointed or even confused that An Ideal Husband has such a serious vein.  That is all the more reason that the director should not try to force the whole work into Earnest mode but allow it to be its own play, fascinated with the various personae that people project and the secrets that lie behind them.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Bahareh Yaraghi as Mrs. Cheveley and Brad Hodder as Lord Goring; Sophia Walker as Gertrude Chiltern and Tim Campbell as Robert Chiltern; Zara Jestadt as Mabel Chiltern and Brad Hodder as Lord Goring. ©2018 Emily Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.