WHEN Laura Wade decided to rework W Somerset Maughan’s highly successful 1926 play The Constant Wife and look at the story through modern eyes, whilst keeping the same storyline she based her script on Maughan’s concept rather than using the original text.
Lyric Hammersmith’s associate director Nicholai La Barrie, who directs this joint production with the Bristol Old Vic, chooses a different route in presenting Oscar Wilde’s classic 1895 play of political corruption and public and private honour. With a few delicious modern references thrown into the mix, he keeps Wilde’s dialogue intact, trusting that he can use it to good effect in a production that sails far away from its traditional roots.
Set and costume designer Rajha Shakiry does away with the usual elegant Edwardian background, replacing it with an almost bare stage, enhanced by some clever use of properties and costumes to fit the more up to date characterisations.
And performances match the costumes. While Chike Okonkwo’s Lord Chiltern, the Ideal Husband put on a pure pedestal on which is impossible to balance, and Tamara Lawrance as Lady Chiltern, the wife looking for a perfect husband, could easily host a present-day political party, Jamael Westman’s foppish Lord Goring, the apparently idle young man whose hidden sharp intelligence saves the Chilterns from personal and political blackmail, would definitely not have been allowed past the doors of a London Gentleman’s Club.
Like Lord Goring’s outlandish costumes, the director deliberately sends some of the cast down the path of overplaying … sailing perilously near to caricature. Foremost of these are Emmanuel Akwafo’s way OTT servants Mason and Phipps, Jeff Alexander’s boisterous Earl of Caversham, Lord Goring’s bucolic father, Suzette Llewellyn as a feather-brained Lady Markby, Nimmy March, a little more subdued as the gossiping Countess of Basildon, and Sule Thelwell’s incompetent suitor Vicomte de Nanjac.
Tiwa Lade brings the freshness of youth to the role of Mabel Chiltern, the object of De Nanjac’s affection, who only has her somewhat-predatory eyes on Lord Goring. The role of Mrs Cheveley, the social adventuress determined to ruin Lord Chiltern politically and Lady Chiltern personally is one of the finest of all Oscar Wilde’s creations. She is not served well in this free-for -all version of the story, which, whilst it draws many almost frightening parallels with modern politics and social life, leaves Aurora Perrineau almost in limbo trying to find the right place to fit this femme fatale into the story.
If you are looking for a traditional presentation of one of Oscar Wilde’s finest comedies, this is not the place to find it. But if you are prepared to take a bright fresh look at a play which still has a great deal to say, and comedy to enjoy more than a-century-and-a-quarter after it’s first production, rush to obtain a ticket for this unbridled production from a director and cast bubbling over with joy and good humour.
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