Underline the epithets used in the review, give their definitions.

TEXT 17. THE IMPORTANCE OF BEEING EARNEST AT REGENT’S PARK

by Charles Spencer

(A delightful open-air production of Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece persuades us to see and hear the play afresh)

The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) is the most perfect high comedy in the English language. Unfortunately, it has become almost too familiar, so that connoisseurs are often anticipating or indeed silently mouthing the greatest lines before they are delivered. Even a play as brilliant as this can lose something of its allure with repetition.

All credit then to director Irina Brown who in this delightful production persuades us to see and hear the play afresh. It helps that we are in the open air, even on a grey and drizzly night, for the breeze, birdsong and rustling leaves banish the feeling that we are watching a dusty museum piece.

Brown refuses to stage the play, as is normally the case, as if it were an almost naturalistic piece of late Victoriana. Wilde’s dialogue is the very reverse of naturalistic – it is epigrammatic, showily artificial, and blessed with a timeless sense of mischief, daring and wit that has never been equalled, though Stoppard and Orton have come close.

The stage in Kevin Knight’s design is dominated by an elegant curving ramp on which the characters often enter and exit an almost bare white stage. A large mirror reflects the audience back at itself and an ensemble of servants aggrievedly eavesdrop on their masters. The cigarette-case argument between Algernon and Jack turns into a rambunctious physical fight, with chases round, and daring leaps over, a circular table.

In the second act, set outdoors in Wilde’s original, scores of rose blooms cover the stage through which the cast have carefully to negotiate their moves.

Some might dismiss all this as an infernal liberty with Wilde’s masterpiece. I believe it is a breath of fresh air that allows us to experience the play anew. The dazzling, dizzying dialogue in which Wilde treats “all trivial things very seriously and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality” zings, sings and stings in this production”.

Dominic Tighe’s Algernon is insufferably and hilariously smug as he wolfs down cucumber sandwiches while Ryan Kiggell’s Jack brings a delicious booming pomposity to the stage. Susan Wooldridge, in one of the most preposterous hats I have ever seen, slyly plays Lady Bracknell as if the old trout were secretly in on the joke of her own authoritarian outrageousness, wincing as if physically attacked when she hears the squalid details of lost babies at London railway termini. The famous handbag is merely the straw that breaks this aristocratic camel’s back. Jo Herbert and Lucy Briggs Owen duel with lethal verbal panache as Gwendolen and Cecily, the latter bringing a peaches-and-cream complexion and a palpable sexuality to the stage, the latter a rare quality in Wilde. And there is touching pathos from Julie Legrand as the bereft Miss Prism.

It is hard to imagine a finer entertainment for an enchanted summer night.

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