On the way into the theatre there is a pop-up display of Victorian photographic portraits. The sitters are stiff in that slow shutter-speed way, holding their gaze in their top hats, frock coats and crinolines. They are all people of colour and, as the curators have it, are a “missing chapter”.
The Black Chronicles exhibition by London gallery Autograph is a good introduction to this staging of Oscar Wilde’s high-society comedy. Director Denzel Westley-Sanderson has taken a piece of traditionally white culture and claimed it as his own. Like the photographs, his production for English Touring Theatre, Leeds Playhouse and the Rose theatre has all the familiar features of The Importance of Being Earnest: the superficiality, the snootiness and the epigrammatic wit. It just happens to be performed by an all-black cast.
