(The Noël Coward Theatre, 20 December 2025)
The production diminishes Oscar Wilde’s characters by erasing their principal traits: class, Englishness, sex, and manners. The time and the place are gone. All that is left is director Max Webster’s lazy caricature of the here and the now. All history has been abolished. The future that remains is the perpetual depreciation of the now.
In Webster’s now, only a priest and a governess—perhaps also Lady Bracknell—remain straight. Actors and actresses adopt an improbable menagerie of manners and speech patterns. The text is true to Wilde but is often recited as a mantra in a foreign tongue; Shakespeare is spoken thus when the meaning eludes the player. What remains of Wilde is carried and carried out by Stephen Fry in his two scenes.
If one believes that historical figures ought not to be judged by present-day prejudices—whether those prejudices are correct or mistaken—then one also ought to be sceptical of ascribing modern-day mannerisms and affectations to each and every character in Wilde’s classical play. By rejecting the past, the production insulates the present from scrutiny by comparison and thereby denies the future.
Webster’s is a decadent production in the best sense of “decadent.” It illustrates how a society in which the past looked exactly like the present would have no future.
