We saw MTC’s Ideal Husband last night and it seemed to me that Wilde’s plays are a bit like a gardening suit that used to be Sunday-best. The script still sparkles like chandeliers and champagne, but in amongst the crystal bubbles the cast find little opportunity to express any meaningful passion – it can all seem such a sham. Zinzi Okenyo’s Lady Chiltern is a marvel – she simply surfs across the froth, commanding attention, stealing the stage whenever she speaks and being the Voice of Reason. Michelle Lim Davidson’s Mabel is the very distillation of the Swiss-finishing-school giggly girl with a twist of Saint Trinians. Perfect. Brent Hill seems to have found Lord Goring’s character on a plate and swallowed it whole – he manages the subtlety of transition from idle fop to moral paragon stylishly and effortlessly – what the Italians call sprezzatura, the art of studied nonchalance. A gorgeous performance.
William McInnes is suitably magnificent; I say that with a touch of vanity because years ago I worked on a show in which he appeared and was more than once mistaken for him, by his dresser. That small matter notwithstanding, his commanding presence and resonant vowels as round as the billiard balls at Whites, are among the heaviest-calibre artillery in the Director’s armoury, but I could not see the target the guns were aimed at. Gina Riley, of course, scored bulls-eyes with every shot, and I noted that Wilde set her a hard task: so many of her laugh-lines come in pairs, or are tags to exits, that she must work harder to land the second through the merriment of the first. She nailed every single one. What can be said about Christie Whelan Browne that has not been said before? Dressing her was obviously an utter joy to Dale Ferguson and Sophie Woodward, and Christie’s Act 2 dress deserves a Helpmann Award on its own. Frocking brilliant, and I suspect that she rather enjoys wearing it. Her poise is pitiless in its perfection, and she revels in it, exquisitely.
Simon Gleason’s Sir Robert is earnest (I choose that adjective with care in a Wilde context), appropriate, correct, everything he ought to be, because he is actually the foil for everyone else in the play. I found myself longing for him to sing, if only to shut the others up. Anyone who has read this far will get that I loved the cast, and every performance they delivered.
Not so sure about the set. Alison describes it as ‘ingenious’. Sorry, everybody, I thought it was awful. When will set designers stop ruling a diagonal line across the floor plan as a starting-out? It compresses every actor’s movement into two-and-a-half dimensions, putting them into the same three-cornered formation again and again and makes the scenery workshop fill the bin with triangular offcuts. Worse yet, a ceiling! A needless black triangle overhead, invisible to half the house, serving no purpose whatever except to force lighting designer Matt Scott to overload the front-of -house perches, casting actor-shadows on the over-dominant drapes.
Perhaps Dale Ferguson and Den Bryant had a meeting where they agreed to step away from the traditional clutter of tea-sets, serving-trays and cucumber sandwiches in favour of a more robust approach to the meat and potatoes of the drama. The result is a sparse set with scant furniture (most of which is recycled from scene to scene) and, honestly, not enough stage business to make it work. When entire scenes are played with no other action that the getting up from one chair in order to sit in another (not actually in a Beardsley pose but in a too-often repeated copy of the same one), it is too easy for an audience to feel adrift in an ocean of words. I’m sorry, Dean and Dale, but I think it just doesn’t quite work. It’s too sparse, too economical and if I dare it, pedestrian. If you had not the good fortune to assemble so magnificent a company of actors, I really don’t think the season would be extending, but thank you, anyway, for a nice night at the theatre.

Last Saturday we saw Colin Friels in Scaramouche Jones. I’ll start by saying I adored every moment. I saw the original, with Pete Postlethwaite, and fifteen years on, comparisons are hardly plausible. I remember enough to know that the two were very different; Friels seems to range further with his voice, mimicking many accents and intonations; Postlethwaite drew more on his gift for mime. Both were moments of pure and priceless theatre magic.
It is a splendid example of a sparse set being only a background for a play where the paintbrush is the actor’s voice and all the scenery is painted in the imagination with a palette of words and sentences. Wilde’s sparkling dialogue is of a quite different character, it paints pictures of people being ‘brilliant’ but still being people, doing, acting and interacting in plausible environments. Alison and I may never agree; our viewpoints are so different I think we are a diameter apart and I’m fine with that. I assume (not unreasonably, I hope) that her view of a play is focussed on the script and he actors’ delivery of it; mine tends to begin with the floor-plan of the set and the lighting-rig. Alison’s life is made out of writing, mine out of scenery and pushing it around. I like to see Wilde done with tea-sets and serving-tongs, sherry-decanters and shoe-trees, soda-siphons and bell-pulls (yes, I do over-hyphenate), and it delights me to see actors who exhibit advanced skill (not much taught at NIDA, VCA and WAAPA) at handling props.
A description of all the business in Scaramouche Jones would scarcely fill a beer-mat: he lights a candle, fiddles with a newspaper and sheds a few garments – that’s about it, but not for a moment did we wonder what he was doing or would do next – the dense tapestry of words was being so thickly woven around us, we were entirely enveloped. Wilde’s comedies will never work like that, their magic is of a different colour.
I really will make an effort and go to the September Live Night and slug it out with Alison, face-to-face.