Is this the most dazzling play of a dazzling playwright? First staged in 1974, Travesties is the one which manages to squeeze avant-garde novelist James Joyce, Dada godfather Tristan Tzara and communist revolutionary Lenin into a story which resembles a riotous party, where Wildean pastiche, political history, debate about art, unreliable memory and song-and-dance routines stay up half the night, and howl gloriously at the moon. This revival stars the ubiquitous Tom Hollander, taking a break from Rev and making up for being cruelly miscast in The Night Manager, and is directed by playwright Read more ...

In popular accounts of Hollywood history, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the insolent real-life first couple of Warner Bros film noirs, have traditionally overshadowed Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. Paramount's fallen angels were quieter onscreen than Bogart and Bacall, but their visual harmony as slender, diminutive blond(e)s – he hard and unsentimental, she silky and insouciant – made for noir's coollest romantic partnership.Arrow Academy has now rereleased The Glass Key (1942) and The Blue Dahia (1946), the middle pair of the four thrillers that teamed Ladd and Read more ...

Some new operas worth their salt work a slow, sophisticated charm, but the handful that holler "masterpiece" grab you from the start and don't let go. Gerald Barry's shorn, explosive Wilde – more comedy of madness than manners – was so obviously in that league at its UK premiere in 2012, and has kept its grip in two runs of Ramin Gray's similarly against-the-grain production, now removed from the currently-closed Linbury Theatre at the Royal Opera House to the wider stage of the Barbican Theatre. It's still one of the few hysterically funny operas in the repertoire. The more you perceive its Read more ...

Geoffrey Rush has done it, Gyles Brandreth has done it, Stephen Fry came close to doing it, and now David Suchet is giving it a go – donning drag and a perpetually disgusted expression to play everyone’s favourite drawing-room gorgon, Lady Bracknell. Having completed its tour around England, Adrian Noble’s affectionate production of The Importance of Being Earnest now sets up home in London’s Vaudeville Theatre, cucumber sandwiches at the ready, hoping to charm summer audiences with an English classic that’ll tick boxes for any tourists not quick enough to get tickets for Wimbledon.There’s a Read more ...

So here’s where I join the ranks of Old Opera Bores by declaring this Salome, Nina Stemme, the best I’ve seen since Hildegard Behrens in 1978, and this Salome as in Richard Strauss’s Wilde opera from Donald Runnicles and his Deutsche Oper Berlin ensemble categorically the most near-perfect. It’s also the first time I’ve had a group of very loud, rude people behind me shouting “sit down” when I stood at the end (and John the Baptist’s God knows I don’t do that often). To which the only answers were “stand up yourselves” and “what does it take?” Most of the arena stalls eventually followed suit Read more ...

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” declares Lord Darlington in Act II of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. He’s the classic Wildean cad - unprincipled, facetiously witty and in this production, possessed of the vilest pencil moustache, and yet the playwright gives him the most memorable line of the whole play. Why? To demonstrate that nobody is too completely good or bad not to be redeemed by beauty.irst performed in 1892, Lady Windermere’s Fan was Wilde’s first society comedy and its success set him on the way to becoming one of the most popular Read more ...

“Some might say we’re getting too old for this sort of thing,” declares Martin Jarvis’s Jack Worthing, going off Wlldean piste. Well, we did wonder whether the reunion of Jarvis with Nigel Havers’s Algernon after 32 years might not be some sort of vanity Earnest. But you can trust director Lucy Bailey to make sense not only of “the boys” but also their mature objects of desire, not to mention a Lady Bracknell (Siân Phillips, flawless, pictured below) who at an astonishing 81 is past having a daughter of marriageable age.It’s a more radical twist now than getting a man to play Lady B (though Read more ...

Adapted by Linnie Reedman and with music by Joe Evans, Oscar Wilde’s only novel – the more scandalous original version serialised in 1890, which Wilde himself later expurgated – finds a new lease of life narrated by one of its minor characters: theatre impresario and Sibyl Vane’s manager Mr Isaacs. In this production he may not be “fat” but, scraping and bowing at every turn with “pompous humility”, he is certainly played, uncomfortably at times, as stereotypically Jewish, albeit in not quite so heightened a manner as most Victorian portrayals.  Yet the anti-Semitism clearly signposted Read more ...

If you were new to contemporary opera, you might think it was forbidden for modern works to be funny. Tragedy is still the default setting for major commissions. You only get serious money if you have serious thoughts and serious music, it seems. At the Royal Opera, the policy is to stage unfunny, ancient buffas on the main stage and sharp, modern ones in the Linbury Studio Theatre. Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest is the latest.The concert premiere last year was as close to an overnight smash hit as it is possible to get in opera. The three-act adaptation was snapped up by Read more ...

David Hare's 1998 play wasn't terribly well received when it was first produced by the Almeida; several critics regarded it as a thin work, weakly directed by Richard Eyre, and opined that Liam Neeson was miscast in the role of Oscar Wilde. Now comes a revival, directed by Australian Neil Armfield that has, on the face of it, dream casting in Rupert Everett as the Irish playwright hounded by the British ruling classes for his homosexuality.It's a play of two halves, in more ways than one, as Hare creates a sort of diptych of Wilde's life. The first act is set in the louche Cadogan Hotel on Read more ...

It’s ironic that Oscar Wilde should escape to the Lake District in 1891 to write a play satirising London society, his first success in the theatre. He took such a shine to the region’s place names that he used them for some of the characters – Berwick, Carlisle, Darlington, Jedburgh. They do seem to lend themselves to titles - we could have had Lady Coniston or Lord Buttermere or Countess Rydal Water. But we got Lady Windermere, which has become part of the language, with that fan, a present from her husband on her 21st birthday, when the play opens.The four-act play is like a Carlton House Read more ...

A cult suggests unhealthy worship, and there’s more than a whiff of that in the heady decadence of the V&A’s latest art and design blockbuster, The Cult of Beauty. This is an exhibition which examines how the influence of a small clique of artists grew to inspire ideas not only about soft furnishings and the House Beautiful, but to influence a whole way of life, teaching the aspiring Victorian bohemian how, in the words of Oscar Wilde, “to live up to the beauty of one’s teapot”. And as one might expect, the exhibition is beautifully designed, in a way that suggests you might have stumbled Read more ...