The Importance of Being Earnest:Tomahawk Theatre Company, The North Wall

4:24pm Friday 18th December 2009

By Christopher Gray

‘Untruthful! My nephew Algernon? Impossible! He is an Oxonian.” Lady Bracknell’s line – as ever when delivered to an Oxford audience – was given the loudest laugh of the evening on the first night of Tomahawk’s enjoyable production of Oscar Wilde’s wittiest play. As with so much of what the terrifying Lady B. has to say, it is precisely because the observation is so wide of the mark that we find it funny. Oxonian fibbers? They’re everywhere.

I would be joining their number if I were to pretend that this latest offering from reliable Tomahawk is an unqualified success. While Wilde’s aphorisms shine as brightly as they always do – it would take a poor company indeed to dull the lustre of these gems – there is a distinctly down-market aura about the enterprise that sits slightly uneasily with the material.

The vowel sounds of some of the performers, for instance – and I will not be unkind enough to name names – are not quite of the sort you would expect from denizens of the upper-class milieu in which the action is set. Had I been the director, Rachel Johnson, I fancy I might have introduced some of the players to the rigours of elocution lessons in “how now brown cow?” style.

This gripe out of the way, let me now say what is spot-on in the production – and this certainly includes Mary Stuck’s Lady Bracknell. The character’s utterances are delivered precisely as one would wish – familiarity, as ever, breding only contentment here – and, as in every successful portrayal of the ogress, we are given frequent glimpses of the good egg behind the forbidding exterior.

In the presentation of the play’s other senior figures there is fine work, too, from Emma Way as the prissy governess Miss Prism and Alistair Nunn as the man she regards as a “permanent public temptation,” the bachelor cleric Dr Chasuble, here a rather more robust figure than usual, thereby making her admiration more credible.

Certainly, there is no doubting the appeal of Jennifer Rae’s Gwendolen Fairfax or Jenny Ross’s voluptuous Cecily Cardew. These are, indeed, young ladies worth wooing, so Alex Nicholls’s Ernest Worthing and Tom Bateman’s flashy Algernon Moncrieff – both well-judged portraits of the fops – show sound sense there, if not necessarily in all other areas.