The Importance of Being Earnest, Vaudeville Theatre: Manages to be subversive and conformist at the same time

Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy A year-long celebration of the works of Oscar Wilde by Dominic Dromgoole’s Classic Spring company reaches its climax with Michael Fentiman’s production of the author’s masterpiece, a play which transmutes Wilde’s turbulent real-life anxieties about double-lives and the threat of exposure into intoxicatingly madcap comedy. The discovery of Jack’s parentage allows the established order to be reassembled but not before the whole idea of polite society has been exposed as a fiction, as dependent upon arbitrary rules as a piece of theatre or Miss Prism’s abandoned three-decker novel. As Lady Bracknell, Sophie Thompson handles the tricky “handbag” moment by a gesture of snobbish recoil that makes her look as if she’s trying to ingest her own face. This has been a wonderfully worthwhile season – particularly in showing you Wilde’s sensitivity to the pressures women face – and Dromgoole deserves to be proud of it.