To update Oscar Wilde is a perilous game. He is a playwright locked in the manners and mores of his time. To change the context is to risk sacrificing the comedy. Undeterred, director Josh Roche makes a convincing stab at a 21st-century makeover of The Importance of Being Earnest, first performed in 1895, even if the concept wobbles after its initial gains.
By setting the play among today’s idle rich, Roche breathes fresh life into a familiar classic. Algernon Moncrieff (Parth Thakerar) lounges around in his smart-but-casual cottons, up-turning discarded takeaway cartons and picking out the tune of Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody on his Casio keyboard. His pal Jack Worthing (Robin Morrissey) is a public-school layabout with more education than sense.
The new perspective sharpens Wilde’s aphorisms and satirises the young men’s indolence. Rather than indulge their poshness, it offers it up for scrutiny.
That remains the case with the arrival of Gwendolen Fairfax (Phoebe Pryce). She is earnest about Ernest and hilariously humourless, but worldly enough to post her engagement ring on Instagram the moment Jack proposes.
Ruling the roost, Lady Bracknell (Abigail Cruttenden) is no stage ogre, but a recognisably formidable force, a woman powered by her own sense of entitlement. Even her silvery bouffant speaks authority. The younger generation buckle at her every pronouncement.
But after a striking – and funny – start, the production falters with the move to the country. In a gently tweaked script, we are on the other side of the north-south divide in the environs of Cheshire. An explosion of blossom cascades from Eleanor Bull’s set above a garden of fluffy pink mounds. Although nature has been made synthetic, the artificial language of the city has been dropped, giving Miss Prism (Emma Cunniffe) and the trust-fund teenager Cecily Cardew (Rumi Sutton) a modern-day directness.
This is a Cecily who lives through her phone, keeps an online diary and corrects Algernon for referring to her “pretty little head”. So far so feminist, but without the sheen of politeness, her newly assertive lines lose their wit. It makes for a mirthless start to the second act, until the plot deceptions kick in and Wilde’s mighty comedy asserts itself once more.
• At the Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 20 July
