NT LIVE: THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

This production from the National Theatre, directed by Max Webster, certainly injects the play with a vivid contemporary flavour, all while maintaining its late Victorian setting. It bursts with pastel colours and queer excess, with the performances pitched in the style of a French farce. Everything is heightened, ridiculous and boisterous, giving space for Wilde's crackling wit to burst across the stage as if it were bolts of electricity. While the production does bring out the best qualities of Wilde's play, it also emphasises its weaknesses, and while trying to make the work feel as contemporary as possible adds some weaknesses of its own.

I must admit, I'm not a fan of 'Earnest' as a play. The story is clever and the characters are wonderful, but much like Wilde's other work, I find that it tends to be too in love with the sound of its own voice (that is to say, Wilde's voice). A good production needs to make the narrative feel active, circumnavigate around its tendency to slam the breaks while it rattles off some witty if irrelevant banter. To begin with, Webster does this by adding Wilde's queer identity into the mix, most prominently in Ncuti Gatwa's delicious, voracious, excessive and deeply sexy interpretation of Algernon. He lives life to the greatest excess, Gatwa taking Algie's desire for pleasure as far as he can.

What really hits from the moment the production begins is its incredible sense of play and energy. The performance style, the production design and the staging need to match the verbosity of Wilde's words, and the thrilling opening sequence, with Algie ravishing in a pink gown playing the piano while tuxedoed men dance and swoon about him, sets our expectations for what is to come. Each performer that then joins Gatwa brings their own flavour of the ridiculous, Skinner with his nervous and combustible Jack and Adékoluẹjo with her absolute live wire, gloriously rambunctious Gwendolen. Everyone is matching the steps set by Gatwa and keeping up with the rhythm set by Walker. The best way this opening act handles the verbosity of Wilde's language is to always keep ahead of it.

It also sees the introduction of Clarke's magnificent Caribbean-infused reimagining of Lady Bracknell. It's a genius move, making a character that had fallen into cliché feel immediately fresh and exciting again. While everyone bursts like firecrackers around her, Clarke remains still, a monument to decorum and authority. One of the faults of the play is how heavily it relies on Lady Bracknell to keep the comedy moving, but by embracing her as an aristocratic woman of colour, and one who has the authority to hold the room while barely moving, it adds to Wilde's commentary on the ruthlessness within the upper classes to preserve and protect their status. For me, this was the most fascinating, exciting and successful subversion of the play in this production, one that added weight to a comedy that can often be so light.

The addition of Scanlen, Lawrence and Cant in the second act keeps the energy in the air and the style flowing nicely, but as the play goes on, the queer infusion begins to confuse rather than enhance. It's never clear exactly why Algie begins his pursuit of Cecily, their connection more akin to a teenage girl and her gay BFF rather than anything romantic. There is maybe a hint of Algie pursuing the match for money, but that doesn't seem to hold either. The queerness of the production then skyrockets in the hysteria of the final act, but the problem here is that the text as it exists doesn't support this. While Wilde's sexuality certainly plays into the tone of his play, it isn't an active part of the narrative, even ambiguously as it is in his novel 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'. The subversive queerness feels invigorating at the beginning, but by the end, it feels like a frivolous imposition. The play and the production are moving too fast to let it actually settle in, and I had to wonder whether the speed and chaos with which the production approached the ending was in order that the audience never stop and think about what the play has to say about sexuality (which, if anything, seemed very confused). Perhaps this is just part of the attempt to make it feel contemporary, but slapping on some allusions to fluid sexuality doesn't make something immediately contemporary.

This is certainly not a fault of the performances, all of which work wonderfully from beginning to end. The fault is in the dramaturgy of the production. These choices, while spirited, don't seem to have been considered as carefully as they could be. 'Earnest' may be, at its weakest, an enjoyable farce, but this doesn't allow for additional flavours to be haphazardly thrown in, and it's disappointing to see how choices that felt so deliberate in the first act seem frivolous by the end. It confuses the politics, the commentary and the narrative of the play, at exactly the point where Wilde is getting focused, pulling the threads together and landing his ending with aplomb. The comedy in the play is the preposterous ease with which it all falls into place. The confusion of the production is how their choices seem to pull all those pieces apart again for no discernible reason.

This isn't to say that a rigorous queer reimagining of Wilde's play wouldn't work. It's just a disappointment that this production, so very much headed in that direction, seems to give up halfway through. The same can be said for elements of the design. While the opening scene makes use of a spirited dance version of a classical piece, the show later simply reverts to the lazy trope of a 'Bridgerton'-style, classically-interpreted pop songs, a convention now totally devoid of originality. This speaks to the great misfire of this production: that, by the end, it has induced its audience away from thinking critically about what the play has to say to begin with. Even with my misgivings about Wilde's text, it's far from a frivolous play, but the final act of this production falls so thoroughly into frivolity.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it and what the production is simply asking is for the audience to have a good time. There were certainly moments that grabbed me in ways this play rarely does, and the performances (especially from Gatwa, Clarke and Adékoluẹjo) were so wonderfully nimble and endlessly playful. If the joy for the audience in revisiting a classic like this is seeing how a contemporary company of artists might refit this play from another time and make it feel fresh and immediate for them, then this National Theatre production, as sweet a confection as it is, fails to deliver on that opportunity.