What better place than the sweeping lawns of the Wormsley Estate for The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde’s “trivial comedy for serious people” that famously lampoons the upper reaches of English society via an unfortunate incident with a handbag. Lest anyone imagine this might smack of complacency, Garsington’s uproarious new production of Gerald Barry’s 2012 opera takes a jet wash to any preconceptions, leaving Wilde’s original glittering with risk and baring some very sharp teeth. It’s savage, darling.
Barry’s genius has been to recontextualise this iconic comedy of manners irrevocably within the aesthetic movement’s anarchic other: nonsense. With kaleidoscopic extremity, Barry’s score takes all the social niceties that make this play feel like part of our national language – the cups of tea, that handbag and all those cucumber sandwiches – and extrudes them beyond ludicrousness, rendering them a bubbling morass of class war. Recurring motifs are dominated by a deconstructed Auld Lang Syne, cracked open like Algernon’s grand piano after the *EXPLOSION!* (Just go and see it.)
The opening duet between Algie and Jack lurches up and down the octaves and into staccato falsetto outbursts about marriage and cucumber sandwiches, the words and syllables sliced away like crusts, while the woodwinds pipe away busily below stairs and the arrival of Lady Bracknell is heralded with much harrumphing in the heavy brass. Later on, the Reverend Chasuble (Kevin Whately, no less) arrives to an extremely persistent French horn swarm of bees. Occasional moments of calm (and there aren’t many in this helter-skelter piece) are reminiscent of Poulenc’s Morte et le boucheron from the inexplicably silly Les Animaux modèles; and no musical nonsense could be complete without several nods to Eric Satie, crockery included.
It’s all absolutely smashing. Director Jack Furness and his team have fully embraced the dark Wonderland theme. Francis O’Connor’s glorious set is dominated by an enormous absinthe-green chaise longue hung on a diagonal so the characters can slide down (a little butter and they’d go faster) or clamber up in this precarious game of social snakes and ladders. A dirt floor accommodates several bouts of mud wrestling while a butler’s pantry is neatly accoutred with all manner of items specified in Barry’s score, from Wellington boots to guns to garden hose, every one of them discharged with surly aplomb by the magnificent Peter Lidbetter as Lane/Merriman. Fellow domestics are sat on and squashed or simply dispose of themselves.
Lady Bracknell – indelibly embodied by Henry Waddington and impeccably tailored by costume designer Hannah Wolfe – makes a series of unforgettable entrances, pantomime-dame-style, though S&M Roman centurion is not a look we’ll be seeing quite yet at the Worthing Pavilion . This Lady B takes her tea rather more thoroughly than Wilde might have imagined, and her dependents follow suit in one of the production’s many set pieces of outrageous clowning, thanks to movement director Rebecca Meltzer.
Jennifer France is irresistibly piquant in Pepto Bismol pink as Cecily Cardew, her pinpoint tone on a succession of top Cs the taxed pressure valve on Cecily’s overheating libido. “All women become their mothers” etc, and Holly Brown’s Gwendolen Fairfax, merciless in acid lemon, is sufficiently commanding both vocally and physically to give any would-be suitor pause.
Zahid Siddiqui as Jack Worthing and Seán Boylan as Algernon make a wonderful pair, every bit as hapless as they should be though with astonishing vocal clarity in the circumstances. That any one of this outstanding cast can keep up with the complexity of the vocal demands at the same time as being squirted with a hose, stripped and popped up through a trap door, or dodging the pistol Lady B keeps in her handbag, is impressive. That they can all do it – and flawlessly – is in the realm of miracles.
Douglas Boyd had the Philharmonia Orchestra flying by the seat of their pants, though always keeping madness on the right side of mayhem, black eye courtesy of the half-time *EXPLOSION!* notwithstanding. One can only hope he has spent the rest of the weekend in an ice bath.
The common fear about contemporary opera is that you won’t be able to whistle the tunes on your way home. Not a bit of it. While Barry’s music may not exactly induce earworms, at the dining interval, Garsington’s picnic tents were transformed into miniature Mad Hatter’s tea parties as condiments were passed around to vigorous recitative, the clatter of plates in the open air delicious thrills of alarm. And, after this old favourite seen anew, the strains of Auld Lang Syne drifted from several quarters into the sunset.
If silliness is to work on stage it must be taken seriously: comedy doesn’t work without risk. In embracing these principles Garsington have triumphed. It’s the most fun anyone’s going to have this season with what few clothes on the meteorologically adjusted dress code will allow. Strip off and wrestle for a ticket.
