Lady Windermere's Fan

When excitingly flicking through the glossy pages of the Fringe Catalogue one is frequently met with the listing of an Oscar Wilde play. These productions have a timelessness about them which will continue to inspire directors all over the globe to take up Wilde’s scripts. This sheer ubiquity, as with Shakespeare, can lead to a staleness of performance – when the twists and turns of plot are already known, the fundamental tenets of theatre become all the more important making excellent direction and casting integral.

Jim Slip’s production failed in all of the above. Such failures were made lucidly evident by the first scene. The actors enter with bizarre, strangely anachronistic costumes. Not so because the production is set at another time – it is set in the Victorian times. It just appears that the production company have searched their wardrobe for ‘Victoriany’ looking clothes. As the scene progresses it becomes clear that the cast cannot act. This is made all the worse by the self-congratulatory smiles that plague the characters’ faces every time they kill one of Wilde’s jokes.

The party scenes present a sprawl of people not quite knowing where to stand, whilst Margaret’s soliloquies are laced with melodramatic sharp intakes of breath which scream ‘oh what is a girl to do?’ To complete the experience, the canned mumble of conversation which plays through the speakers has a habit of turning off at random, obliterating any remnant of atmosphere that was previously created. The crucial point is this: if a director manages to make Wilde unfunny, something is exceedingly wrong.