Directing an Oscar Wilde play is rather like being a chaperone at a party: at best you are invisible, at worst actively intrusive. Marshalling Wilde’s politicos, dandies and duchesses through An Ideal Husband, Lindsay Posner is quick to lose himself among the elegant riot of gilded sets and gorgeous dresses. Faithful to the letter (pink-papered, naturally), the production plays it straight, relying on the skills of a splendid cast.

Weightier than A Woman of No Importance, and less dazzlingly polished than The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband is an awkward creature. Whether it is a political drama masquerading as drawing-room comedy or vice versa, its two registers must somehow be made to co-exist. It’s an issue of scale, and one that Posner and his team come close to solving through carefully-judged exaggeration. Stephen Brimson Lewis’s lavish vision for the Chilterns’ Grosvenor Square home is a fanfare of golden domes and pillars that doesn’t so much scream wealth as mutter it in a decorous undertone — a gilded cage for its gorgeously plumed inhabitants.

The visual attention to detail is minute; what a shame then that in the delicate fabric of Wilde’s dialogue there was a six-inch tear courtesy of more stutters and stumbles than a provincial ingénue. Perhaps it was press night nerves, but there was a tension to the first-half dialogue that blighted the careful rhythm of Wilde’s prose, failing to frame its wit with the fluidity it demands.

Stumbles aside, this is a dream cast. Samantha Bond’s caressing huskiness was made for the menacing Mrs Cheveley, a woman who pilfers jewels and private correspondence with equal ease. A delicious villain, she is matched for commitment by Rachel Stirling’s Lady Chiltern — truly “pitiless in her perfection”.

Veterans Caroline Blakiston (as champion of Old Values, Lady Markby) and Charles Kay (all expostulation and whiskers as the Earl of Caversham) all but walk off with their scenes, but are gamely challenged by their younger counterparts.

Mabel Chiltern comes courtesy of Fiona Button, whose silken repartee flows as elegantly as her skirts. As Lord Goring, Elliot Cowan makes a splendidly lived-in hero. With a vocabulary of sighs, hunches, shuffles and facial acrobatics he finds the human whimsy so crucial to the character.

An Ideal Husband will never make an ideal play. Its tone is too uneven, its conflict too Victorian to really translate into satisfying drama. Yet if Wilde has taught us anything it is that felicity is a more than adequate substitute for profundity, a lesson that Posner and his cast have embraced in all its glossy, glittering superficiality.

Vaudeville Theatre, London, until February 19. Box office: 0844 412 4663.