Anyone who has seen the opera before will recognise the tall rack of white dinner plates, stacked and primed for you-know-what. Anyone who knows Oscar Wilde’s play will recognise its punchlines, transposed by composer Gerald Barry into a kind of staccato mashup between speech and singing. But in Jack Furness’s new production of Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest for Garsington Opera, familiarity is otherwise avoided.
Barry has already transformed Wilde’s “trivial comedy for serious people” into what he calls “an opera of delirium”. Singing offers another layer of perversity, orchestral scoring another source of wit, and stage business a further level of zaniness. Furness’s additions include a grand piano on stilts, a kangaroo that meets a nasty end, an enormous chaise longue-cum-slide (which suffers one of the play’s mysterious explosions during the dinner interval), a dirt floor and working hose to allow the protagonists to be mud-smeared and soaked through in alternation, and a herd of miniature cows. The result is a kind of hyperactive nightmare, its pace slowed by all these efforts to shock, the comedy turned sour.
Hannah Wolfe’s gloriously madcap costume designs stand out in the darkness. Algernon wears a bowtie with his silk PJs, Gwendoline has ultra-structured dresses that riff subtly on 1890s silhouettes, Miss Prism wears walking trousers and sensible shoes with her neatly coiffed late-Victorian updo. Cecily’s outfits are hysterically frilled and uniformly pink.
Perhaps inevitably, Lady Bracknell’s looks got the evening’s loudest laughs. Played by Garsington regular bass-baritone Henry Waddington, she boasts a blunt grey bob, lipstick and a beard. Appearing first in a trouser suit, later in what I can only describe as Bismarck-goes-dominatrix, complete with shiny latex cape and military helmet, she keeps a gun in her Thatcherite handbag. Waddington’s capacity for deadpan was vital, as was his enthralling stage presence and astonishing facility with words in both English and German.
The cast was otherwise a true ensemble of singing actors. For Seán Boylan’s Algernon, Zahid Siddiqui’s Jack and Holly Brown’s Gwendolen, taut coordination, excellent diction and the ability to spit tea on command mostly outweighed the conventional business of tone production – though Jennifer France’s Cecily squeaked and shrilled as only a genuinely fine soprano could. Susan Bickley was oddly touching as Miss Prism, Kevin Whately a warm star-turn in the speaking role of Dr Chasuble and Peter Lidbetter a po-faced delight as the long-suffering butler, his plate-smashing a masterpiece of comic timing.
Douglas Boyd led a subset of the Philharmonia Orchestra (on stage throughout) in a high-definition account of Barry’s score, sharply mimetic humour and all. If Furness’s production sees the laughs dwindle, this opera’s latest outing is welcome proof that it has achieved that holy grail of contemporary music theatre: life beyond the premiere.
• At Garsington Opera until 23 July
