Comedy classic is perfect opener

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST
Oldham Coliseum, to Saturday

LONDON Classic Theatre returns to Oldham to perform the first play in the reopened theatre and what better than this comedy, one of the greatest of them all.

Though director Michael Cabot suggests in the programme he has done a lot of work to make the characters more realistic while at the same time making the sets less so, the truth is Wilde’s work is almost impervious to anything a director does to it.

You could do no research, dispense with a set and get the cast to read it aloud and the result would still be funny. Wilde gathered together about as many comic aphorisms and witticisms as any single play might stand, then wrapped them into a perfect little comedy with a satisfyingly complete plot that sets up many strands and ties up each one of them beautifully.

About the only thing a director and cast can do is get it badly wrong, and while Cabot doesn’t do anything like that and his cast remains funny throughout, there is a curious bit of casting.

Most fans consider Jack Worthing mature, tall and dependable and Algernon slight and thin. Here the relationship is skewed because Paul Sandys is short and youthful as Jack and Ashley Cook about a foot taller and heavier as Algernon.

It upsets the balance of the universe slightly — and isn’t helped by Sandys having a high, thin voice, used most of the time in an emphatic projection bordering on shouting.

One other oddity of casting is to have Laoisha O’Callaghan as Miss Prism with what one assumes is a native Irish accent.

Nothing wrong with that, except the actress speaks her lines with such gymnastic emphasis that at times she is slightly difficult to understand.

No problems with the rest of the cast though; Helen Phillips is a fine Cecily, Helen Keeley a determined Gwendolen, Peter Cadden entertaining as Chasuble and Jonathan Ashley amusing as the two butlers, while Judith Paris is the epitome of understated snobbery as Lady Bracknell.