This is Trevor Baxter’s neat adaptation of an Oscar Wilde short story, the frothy plot circles around Lord Arthur (surely the most gullible airhead in the Wilde pantheon) who is about to marry his sweet heart Sybil. He attends the home of the celebrated Lady Windermere and there meets a palm reader and mystic –Gary Wilmot's  Podgers - who reads a terrible secret in Lord A’s palm; he is going to commit a murder.  Terrified he might kill his fiancé Lord Arthur resolves to quickly find another victim and hence the scene is set for silly mayhem.

It’s a tale of upper class values and morals and the endlessly vacuous way that these Victorians are portrayed by Wilde.  They delight in repartee and of course it’s witty and wise but ejected like bullets from a epigrammatic machine gun rather then the cut and thrust of Wildes usual rapier. The cast literally spit out their lines and aphorisms and epigrams litter the script.

This is a TV mash up, with all the actors being people from the small screen, for most of them this works, for others the harsh light of the theatre, even when it’s mocked up limelight, is unforgiving, but more of that later. Lee Mead as the eponymous Lord, who won Lloyd Webber's Reality TV show gives a great performance here and shows he is so much more than just a singing pretty face. He was superb and a delight to watch, mastering the clip-pity-clop accent perfectly he sounded like a wide awake Hugh Grant.  Gary Wilmot as Podgers (fresh from his Chicago hit) was fun and played the pseudo melodrama to the hilt and it’s a fine Damoclean line this, the other side of that tricky blade being panto. However Wilmot skated along the very edge of the thinnest sharpest edge and kept us giggling.

Louisa Clein’s Sybil was a delightful ‘Victorian wife to be’ injecting her full of modesty and disarmingly funny lines even while her ample bosom was plumped out, and the rest of the supporting cast David Ross as the Dean of Chichester and Derren Nesbit as the anarchist bomb maker are full on fun, although some of the clever modern epigrams were rather lost in their accents and spluttering flourishes.  The dialogue sparkles, but not really in a Wildean way, this is Oscar-lite, all cold contrary epigramic statements without his ruthless paradoxical edge, I was waiting for the scalpel of his wit to shine through but then relaxed and allowed the dialogue to be what it is, a modern interpretation of a classic Victorian melodrama.  It’s then great fun, if you take it as face value and the audience tittered, giggled and laughed throughout the show particularly  at the running gags & witticisms about marriage and husbands. With the scenes separated by some of Oscars poems this show zips along.

The real star of this show is the shows setting itself, and Alexander McPherson’s crew who designed the set and show should be lauded from the rooftops.  The show played out as if in a paper-cut proscenium of late Victorian theatre and again this could slide past the craft knife into tat but in McPherson’s hands it’s a triumph. With knowing irony, delightful lighting and just the right amount of set and an on stage violin and piano duet who paralleled the action with surgical playing, the scene was well and truly set. It felt very authentic, which is more than I could honestly say about some of the cast. The lady violist was a fragile porcelain beauty right out of a Victorian painting, wonderful casting.


What about Ms Kate O’Mara you cry, why all this talk of blades, ani’t she one of the stars of the show? What about those delightful devastating one lines and exquisite epigrams lady Windermere gets to deliver? I thought she may have been recovering from a stroke (so I did some good critic research) or her very expensive  teeth didn’t fit properly as there was a fair bit of  pro-ject-tion going on in a Ray Allen kind of way, but to be as kind as I can be to her performance I’ll call on  another actress three years younger, Catherine Deneuve  who once said ‘Actresses have to be able to frown,’  and dear, dear Oscar himself, after all he should certainly get the last word.   ‘A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.’

Until February 20
Theatre Royal, Brighton. Book here: