The Importance of Being Earnest at the National Theatre review: Ncuti Gatwa stars in a fizzing production

Ncuti Gatwa (Algernon) in The Importance of Being Earnest at the National Theatre - (Marc Brenner)

Feverish excitement greeted the casting of Doctor Who himself, Ncuti Gatwa, as Algernon in Oscar Wilde’s classic 1895 comedy, but he’s not the main draw in Max Webster’s fizzing, knockabout production. Don’t get me wrong: he’s charming and charismatic as the preening sybarite, tossing off witticisms as if they’re going out of fashion.

But his outrageousness feels effortful rather than easy in a staging that’s deliberately OTT. It opens with Gatwa in a cutaway pink ballgown amid an apparent orgy of drag queens and kings. Though things get tamer almost immediately, Webster still tips the text’s implicit gayness into a heavier display of sexual fluidity.

He edges his cast into panto territory with arch asides and occasional contemporary allusions. He also takes Bridgerton-style colourblind casting to a fascinating new level. The usual reactionary suspects will hate it. I loved it because it honours Wilde’s wit but also his radicalism and his embrace of artifice. This is, after all, ostensibly hetero play by a gay writer about two men who invent identities to misbehave, and two women who construct fantasies to escape.

A talented cast tear up and reassemble Wilde. (Marc Brenner)

Algy and his friend Jack (Hugh Skinner, immaculately twittish and sexually ambivalent, the living embodiment of chagrin) speak in received pronunciation. But Algy’s haughty aunt Lady Bracknell (the magnificent Sharon D Clarke) has a Caribbean accent that turns out to suit Wilde’s lines perfectly. I’ll only ever hear the phrase “shilly-shallying” in her voice now. If anyone’s still harping on about Edith Evans’s intonation of the words “a handbag?” 70 years ago, forget it. There’s a new Lady B in town.

Quicksilver actress Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo – always different, always stunning – is all Victorian propriety one minute, all modern raunch the next, as Lady Bracknell’s daughter and Jack’s love interest Gwendolen. She enjoys a relationship that’s friendly, then spiky, then apparently in flagrante with Cecily (pert and snarky Eliza Scanlen), Jack’s ward whom Algy comes to covet.

There’s a new Lady B in town (Marc Brenner)

There’s a knife-edge sense that these boys and girls could end up in any permutation – slightly perverse if you know the final twist. Algy’s butler and Jack’s steward are both played as scene-stealing oddballs by Julian Bleach(YES). Rae Smith’s designs for the London scenes are fairly staid, but her country sets suggest a Fragonard painting filtered through the heightened gay sensibility of Pierre et Gilles photos. Her costumes are out there: flower-printed suits and chiffon shirts for Algy, extravagant bustles and hairpieces for the girls.

There are references to Miley Cyrus and James Blunt, one “sh*t” and one “f**ksake!” There’s also a knowingness to it all, from the handbag suspended over the opening curtain to actors acknowledging their dialogue is covering a scene change.

I’ve seen radical reinventions of this play that didn’t work. This one does. It’s great to see Ncuti Gatwa in it. But greater still to see a talented wider cast tearing up and reassembling Wilde.

The National Theatre, to 25 Jan, nationaltheatre.org.uk.