January 10, 2004: Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
Haymarket Theatre. Evening. Directed by Adrian Noble
A close colleague from Birmingham invited me to lunch with another, London-based colleague at the Garrick Club last Wednesday. At the next table Sir Peter Hall and Adrian Noble were deep in conversation. Together they almost dominate the current theatre season in London. This revival of A Woman of No Importance, directed by Noble, is surely one of the high points. It is crisply and lucidly staged by Noble and wonderfully well acted in a broad, assertive style that represents just the right accommodation of Wilde’s script and the boldly stated mise en scène for which it was written to the expectations of a West End audience of over a century later.
Having just returned to a long-deferred project, a book on Wilde and the theatre, and having just reviewed fifteen years’ worth of notes, I was primed to see the nuances and significance in the play that might not have been quite so clear otherwise. The comment about this play so often made is that Wilde uses a stale melodramatic structure of action, that of a wronged woman made to suffer greatly for her transgressions, as a gratuitous and over-obvious scaffolding on which to hang a desultory witty conversation between Lord Illingworth, the dandy-villain of the play, and Mrs. Allonby, who gives as good as she gets (“Lord I: Life begins with a man and woman in a garden. Mrs A: It ends with Revelation.”). That is, the play lacks coherence. In performance last night it was anything but incoherent. The large arc of the play dramatizes the ultimate connection between words and deeds. One is reminded once again of Feste’s comment — partly self-indicting, truth be told — about the sure real-life consequences of toying with the world. In this way of seeing the play, everything hangs together in unerring teleological certainty, even though we are allowed to enjoy Illingworth’s self-indulgent, mannered style and studied, casual ironies. The charge against Wilde that he summed up all life in an aphorism is perfectly true, and just. Note how this works in the play. Early on, Illingworth proffers the following moral observation (overheard by his abandoned mistress, Mrs Arbuthnot): “Children begin by loving their parents; later, they despise them; seldom if ever do they forgive them.” The action of the play, in which Illingworth is exposed (though not publicly) as Gerald Arbuthnot’s father, brings the circle full, at Mrs Arbuthnot’s “charming, old-fashioned” house, when she throws Illingworth’s words back in his face. What could be a clearer, more coherent confluence of words and deeds than this?
Noble has seen this quite clearly and so has avoided entirely the mistake of making Illingworth merely attractive. Ultimately it is not hard to make Illingworth a little oily, a little calculatedly offensive, and in Rupert Graves’s explicitly, casually measured performance he is just that. Graves tones down any tendency tow