Oscar Wilde’s final play premiered weeks before the court case that led to his imprisonment for homosexuality, and the subtext of homoerotic desire that runs through this comedy of manners from 1895 has been well mined before now.
But it is rarer to see Algernon whirling on to the stage in a hot pink gown, like Marilyn Monroe on acid, or Earnest camping it up with hand on hip. Or indeed, their love interests coming in for a same sex kiss.
Max Webster’s luscious period dress production fuels this story of Algernon (Ncuti Gatwa, flamboyance personified), Jack (Hugh Skinner, comically vulnerable) and their secret identities with queer doubleness. Algernon is a cross-dresser. Jack might swing both ways. Both show up conventional masculinity to be nothing more than a performance. Algernon’s guiding principle of “Bunburyism” (a sensible alter ego who offsets his amoral hedonism), has never sounded more like a sexual double entendre.
But there is an elegance to the nudge-wink references and it is a production with just the right amount of delightful mischief. It borrows its look from Bridgerton’s playbook and there are passing pop references (from musical strains of Snoop Dogg to a mention of the queer London club, Dalston Superstore) but despite its knowingness, there is a delicately judged balance between fidelity to Wilde’s text and 21st-century playfulness.
You can’t help but think Wilde would be wild about this production for its all-round misbehaviour, even if it does feel like subversion lite. The same-sex gropes and innuendoes don’t seem to belong to the characters but are simply there, frothily transgressive rather than sharply satirical. A music-hall red curtain and spotlight occasionally swish on, and you can’t begrudge this for its lack of purpose because it is such good fun.
Most of its upper-class characters look like naughty children lacking self-restraint, from the awkward romance between Reverend Canon Chasuble (Richard Cant) and Miss Prism (Amanda Lawrence, quiveringly brilliant) to Algernon and Jack, who skip, hand in hand, or fight over muffins, like posh, overgrown schoolboys. The current Doctor Who Gatwa brings arch shades of his character in Sex Education to the part while Skinner excels in balancing emotional vulnerability with archness and physical humour.
Perhaps best of all, Sharon D Clarke’s Lady Bracknell is an exquisitely dressed battle-axe of Caribbean heritage, with a head-wrap beneath her enormous yellow hat, and outfits like the best of Bake Off’s show-stoppers. She is all fired up on class snobberies and fears around socialism, the hypocrisies of the Victorian upper-classes firmly sent up through her.
Jack’s ward, Cecily (Eliza Scanlen) carries the hint of a spoilt child, rather like a comic Estella from Great Expectations while his love interest, Gwendolen (Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo), looks like a stick of rock in her tailored pink dress, and brings lovable mischief.
Rae Smith’s set, with its over-bright country garden and white panelled town houses, is as handsomely confected as a wedding cake, but it is her costumes that are to die for, utterly dreamy in their mix of subversion and style, with frills for men and women and a blend of traditional Caribbean and Victorian attire.
The pace never becoming hectic, the physical comedy steers clear of farce and lines are crisply delivered without hamming up. Wilde’s polished oxymorons and inverted wisdom (divorce is a pleasure, wives who flirt with husbands are distasteful etc) can sound relentlessly glib, but here they retain their satirical celebration of shallowness.
Not even a technical glitch in the preview performance I attended could spoil the fun. With its dazzle, joy and original anarchic spirit of pantomime, this is the most stylish festive show in town.
• At the National Theatre, London, until 25 January.
