It’s safe to say Oscar Wilde enjoyed a good party, so it’s very likely he would give a big thumbs up to the Lyric’s An Ideal Husband, which director Nicholas La Barrie has souped up as an Afro-Caribbean comedy of manners, featuring added workouts on the dance floor.
This turns out to be a timely play: a tale of a politician who once passed on key insider knowledge to a third party, whose return favour set him up for a stellar career. Insert the names of our former US ambassador and his cronies, and you can sense the magnitude of the error of judgment the younger Robert Chiltern made. Now his equivalent of a redacted email has resurfaced, and he is threatened with a scandal.
Despite its comedic tone, the play is addressing serious issues about proper governance and the rot the political class has at its heart. As the characters talk of their disenchantment with current politics and recommend Hello! as required reading about modern life rather than The Times’s latest leader, it’s clear that a few simple updating touches are all that’s needed to bring the play alive for a new audience.
The driver of the plot is still an ingenious device involving stolen letters that traps first Robert, now Lord Chiltern (Chiké Okonkwo, pictured left with Tamara Lawrance), then threatens his devoted young wife Gertrude, aka “Gigi” (Tamara Lawrance), with a scandal. But it is delivered in often broad accents that even suave Viscount Goring (Jamael Westman) breaks into when he is being mischievous. His father, the Earl of Caversham (Jeff Alexander), becomes an irascible old-timer with a jabbing walking stick whose turn of phrase has hardly changed since he left his birthplace; and Robert’s sister Mabel (Tiwa Lade), Goring’s potential love interest, is revamped as a fluting minx with a motormouth delivery and lashings of sass, who flounces on and off in a selection of cute frilled mini-dresses.
Various flavours of Black dance music punctuate the action (nice to hear Ms Dynamite again), rousing the cast to bursts of ensemble moves, with Emmanuel Akwafo – the award-winning Bottom in the Bridge’s revival of its Dream – leading the pack. Akwafo plays the two butlers, Mason (pictured bottom) and Phipps, with a gusto that verges on panto humour, but his energy is invaluable in keeping the temperature up during what might normally be dry “business”. As the Chilterns’ Mason, he’s a severe bespectacled type who definitely rules their roost and regularly leaves the room with a trademark “mmm, hmmm” of displeasure; at Goring’s home, his Phipps is a scatty camp disaster area, guaranteed to get things wrong.
The set in scene one conveys the grandeur of an affluent London home with minimal means: just a large staircase, some flowers and “pillars” (nifty beaded strings) to one side. But also out of the darkness two cackling older ladies emerge, the Countess of Basildon (Nimmy March, pictured above, right with Suzette Llewellyn) and her friend Lady Markby (Suzette Llewellyn), wearing wonderful assemblages of fabrics in vibrant colours that almost take the breath away (the excellent set and costume design is by Rajha Shakiry). The younger characters wear approximations of more modern styles, hinting that they have assimilated more of the establishment values around them. Mrs Cheveley (Aurora Perrineau), the spider-woman from Vienna who is cranking the scandal machinery into life, is the most conventionally power-dressed, kitted out in sleek silky shifts and a leather skirt.
The most impressive person onstage, however, is Jamael Westman’s flamboyant idler Goring, a delightful mix of trad and camp who can carry off a formal suit with added skirts, topped off with a shaved head, drop earrings and a feather boa. He gives a masterclass in how to accomplish a lot simply with spot-on timing and unshowy technique, delivering the standard Wildean aphorisms as if they are his natural ideas, not a comic speech, and without charging through them (which other cast members haven’t quite got the knack of). His Goring also quietly triumphs, astutely steering the protagonists away from disaster from behind a barrage of witticisms. He’s a variant of Algernon Moncrieff, but much less annoying.
Westman, who played the first Hamilton in London, still has the athleticism of a musicals star, an agility that is used at unexpected turns in the script, where simple exchanges become witty mini dance routines and a scene change may be performed by the cast in a slo-mo chorus line (movement director is Alexzandra Sarmiento). It’s a production with high levels of invention and raucous good humour. If all repurposing of a text were as imaginatively done, theatre’s older repertoire would easily find new audiences to entertain and excite.
- An Ideal Husband at Lyric Hammersmith until 6 June
- More theatre reviews on theartsdesk
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