The Importance of Being Earnest at National Theatre review

Max Webster’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest opens with Ncuti Gatwa’s Algernon swathed in hot pink ballgown and draped over a piano.

Start as you mean to go. The play is a luscious, saturated explosion that unfolds like a musical number of carefully choreographed wordplay. It is a celebration of appetite and queerness, and Webster’s production is less nudge and wink, and more five-fingered slap. It’s exhilarating.

Oscar Wilde’s final play premiered in 1895, just weeks before the case that led to his two-year imprisonment for homosexuality. So it’s fitting that The Importance of Being Earnest skewers the Victorian façade of manners with a triumphant flick of the wrist. This adaptation does not hide behind the clever twists and turns of Wilde’s prose, rather lines-laced with desire are delivered with slapstick thrusts and entwined limbs. Gatwa is magnetic as epicurean Algernon. He fills the stage with rapacious appetite, breaking through what is described in the play as ‘an age of surfaces’. He takes what he wants – from muffins to lovers – with flamboyant nonchalance. His Algernon is perfectly foiled by Hugh Skinner’s vacillating, anxious Jack, who would take what he wanted, if he only knew what it was. 

The play hinges on Algernon’s devotion to ‘Bunburying’, a subterfuge that sweeps up the entire cast as Wilde gestures to the obvious cracks and contradictions in an era that catapulted him to fame and then threw away the key. 

Webster’s production pulses with artifice, from the candyfloss set to Rae Smith’s exquisitely excessive costumes. The plot of the play itself resembles an orgiastic parody of a Shakespearean romance, but at the end of all the deceits and games and misunderstandings, it doesn’t really matter who ends up with who (or as Jack delights at one moment: “I’m so dazed I don’t know who I’m kissing”).

Among a strong-ensemble cast, the standout out performance is Sharon D Clarke’s tour de force turn as Lady Bracknell. Clarke delivers her lines with a Caribbean lilt so precise that Bracknell’s grimacing incredulity at a ‘handbag’ secures the biggest laugh of the night while feeling entirely revitalised. Clarke’s presence also grounds the entire play, which at times risks outpacing itself with self-referential nods to the audience as it slides into the realm of pantomime. But with a few steps onto the stage, Clarke wrests back control of this truly funny adaptation.

The Importance of Being Earnest passes like a kaleidoscopic dream on a chaise longue. It is clever and queer and debauched and hungry. It isn’t, perhaps, one for the purists and pearl-clutchers, but then again, Wilde never was.

• The Importance of Being Earnest is on now at the National Theatre