This year, the Shaw Festival completes its multi-season presentation of three of the four main plays by Oscar Wilde with the second of the sequence, A Woman of No Importance.
This is a one of Wilde's earlier efforts for the theatre, and has never achieved the raging success of his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest. It seems plain to me that Wilde was still honing the craft of the playwright, and was having some trouble deciding just what sort of play he wished to write. Was it to be biting social satire, serious social criticism, trembling melodrama, or a combination of all three? All three types are certainly represented in the play as it stands. As well, he still had not acquired the skill in selecting, polishing, and above all rejecting his first thoughts that did so much to shape Earnest into a nearly-perfect jewel of the theatrical repertoire.
Eda Holmes has directed a fine production which makes the best of the contradictory pulls in Wilde's verbose script -- but alas, the contradictions cannot entirely be reconciled.
One of the biggest drawbacks for a modern audience is that Wilde has followed the convention of the day in filling his play with a number of superfluous and often largely interchangeable aristocratic characters. The main action grinds to an absolute halt in the early going while these carefree aristocrats exchange barbed witticisms about other aristocrats ad infinitum. There are some good laughs during these scenes -- they contain many of the anticipations of Earnest in the writing -- but confusion about where the play is going cannot be avoided.
In the end, only four of the characters really partake in the main plot: young Gerald Arbuthnot; his mother, Rachel Arbuthnot; the young American socialite, Hester Worsley; and the consummate man-about-town, Lord Illingworth. But it takes a long time during the first act and half of the second act before this distinction begins to become clear to the audience. By the fourth act, the aristocrats have virtually disappeared.
That main plot involve the classic device of the concealed identity and the so-called "fallen woman", which brings it into close kinship (thematically) with Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession (also performed this year -- see review # 2), and with Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.
But the kinship with Shaw is only thematic, not in the treatment, for it is just in dealing with this main plot that Wilde comes closest to the edge of the melodramatic tearjerker. Fortunately, he does not fall completely into the trap, and his ending pulls off an almost Shavian pair of reversals which proclaim him, if nothing else, certainly not the absolute slave of theatrical convention. And it is the women who make these astonishing (for the period) about-face turns, making them in the end the most important people in the play.
The director's notes in the programme explain in some detail why she chose to set the play in 1951 rather than 1889. My personal feeling is that the difference really isn't worth dwelling upon. The aristocrats of 1951 were still, in many cases, living in the same stately homes as in 1889 (the mass sell-off to the National Trust having not quite come to a head as of yet). Not only that, but the clothes they wore -- while hewing to a different stylistic ethic, perhaps -- still evoke a society with piles of money and no concept of value for money. Both eras are now within the same bracket of past time -- distant enough to seem old, yet recent enough to feel recognizable.
Michael Gianfrancesco's sets and costumes clearly evoke both the distance and the familiarity, with colours keyed to individual characters throughout. One of the most eye-catching figures, whenever she is on stage, is Mrs. Allonby. Her evening gown, in striking maroon mingled with darker shades, also has the most daring cut of any of the dresses worn in the play.
She's probably a good place to start on the acting. Mrs. Allonby is one of two of the aristocratic menage (although not herself an aristocrat) who really claimed my attention, and it wasn't just a matter of costuming. Her lines in the script suggest a woman who is thoroughly sensual by nature and who treats relations between the sexes as a matter for her own personal amusement rather than any more serious or lasting purpose. Diana Donnelly did not so much walk as sashay or prowl, she didn't so much stand as pose seductively, and she didn't so much speak words as she drawled out satirical pronouncements laden with hidden little come-hither messages.
The other was Lady Hunstanton, the hostess of the house where the first three acts take place. Her most characteristic turn of phrase was the three perfectly-timed little words, "...or is it...?" Her part is full of little confusions where she manages to reverse whatever she intends to say, and then has to correct it. Fiona Reid is a master of this kind of verbal comedy, and although her timing of those three key words was always impeccable, it was never quite the same twice running.
Gerald Arbuthnot is a young man of considerable determination and strength of will, characteristics he has inherited from his mother. Wade Bogert-O'Brien caught both the determination and the petulant stubbornness into which it sometimes falls.
Martin Happer wore the suave, ironic side of Lord Illingworth like a second skin. He was less convincing in the last scene where Illingworth tries to appear more genuine and sincere. Since the ironic tilt of the voice didn't change much, the sum effect was not so much dramatic tension within the character as a kind of subtle telegraphing that the melodrama villain was still twirling his mustache and chortling evilly to himself under the surface. And perhaps he was.
Julia Course was statuesque and powerful as Hester Worsley. The scene where she rebukes the aristocratic school for scandal on their shallowness and rudeness is breathtaking. She comes across as the most morally rigid person present when she demands that the sins of the fathers be visited upon the children. The process by which she unbends in Act IV was nuanced in voice, gesture, and face, and became totally believable.
As Mrs. Arbuthnot, Gerald's mother, Fiona Byrne commands the stage. When she appears at Lady Hunstanton's soiree, her black dress makes her stand out in a roomful of aristocratic peacocks. So does her straightforward voice and carriage. As the play proceeds and we realize, more and more, that it is her story we are watching, her dominance of the stage increases. The final scene in which she firmly rejects Lord Illingworth's proposal of marriage is far better written than any melodramatic "happy ending", and Byrne lifted the entire play to another level with her performance in this scene.
Throughout the play, Holmes staged each scene without any apparent difficulty in highlighting whatever the audience most needs to see and hear. The action flowed naturally from first to last as much as the awkwardnesses of the script would permit.
In sum: A Woman of No Importance is an entertaining, engrossing production of a playscript which certainly has its moments -- but which is really two quite different plays jammed up against each other, and therefore will always present major difficulties to anyone attempting to stage it.
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