This is a straightforward production of a familiar old play.
There is no attempt to open it out. It is staged very simply on a handful of sets, entirely in a TV studio. It also looks as if it might have been shot in real time, with all the editing done in the camera. For example, Joan Plowright seems to miss a couple of her cues, leaving awkward pauses between lines, while Paul McGann's voice has an irritating tendency to rise to a squeak at the end of sentences. In a more conventional 'cinematic' production these little glitches would surely have been edited out.
The performances are nothing special. Rupert Frazer is not too bad and does manage to capture the brio of Algernon, but Paul McGann is a somewhat lugubrious Jack and we see none of the rakishness that would have necessitated the invention of the fictional Ernest. The women tend to fare better. Amanda Redman and Natalie Ogle at least put some gusto into their performances. Joan Plowright is not as dependable as I would have expected. She, in particular, seems to be struggling to remember her lines.
Overall, the production looks desperately under-rehearsed. It seems to be at the stage where the actors have memorized their parts but haven't really developed their performances yet. Too often, they gabble their way to the end of the line but with no sense of comic timing. After 15 or 20 minutes of watching joke after joke crash and burn through poor delivery, I was ready to give up. This is amateur dramatics night at the local Church Hall.
However, for me the real problem is the play itself.
It is often described as a comedy of manners, or even a satire, but it is really just a pure farce. Nobody gets to dress as a woman, nobody has to hide in a cupboard and nobody drops his trousers, but ultimately it has no more substance than those Whitehall farces that Brian Rix used to do in the Fifties and Sixties. The tragedy of Wilde's later life (and his other, more considerable, achievements) shouldn't betray us into seeing more in this play than the frothy entertainment it was intended to be.
As with other farces, nothing need make any sense so long as it is funny. Consequently, we have two separate women who independently arrive at the resolution that they will only marry men named Ernest. This whimsical conceit has no basis in reality and says nothing about Victorian women, society, morals or manners - or anything else, for that matter. Its arbitrariness and its transparent absurdity is the point of the joke.
There is only one issue that need concern us: how good a farce is it?
The plot is unusually thin. In a good farce, the initial premise quickly spirals into situations of ever increasing perplexity so the plot becomes more and more tangled and convoluted - to the point where you wonder how it is going to be possible to tie it all up at the end. That is not really true of this play: the confusion with the fictional Ernest, Algernon's imposture, the mistaken rivalry of the two women and the mystery of Jack's origins are all introduced serially, only to be quickly resolved. Wilde wasn't that good at plots.
However, it does have a high joke count. In that respect, it resembles a good modern sitcom more than a Whitehall farce. The trouble is that the jokes are all very similar. Wilde tossed off epigrams like Richard Prior tossed off profanities, but they often seem a bit mechanical: typically, Wilde just takes a commonplace idea or phrase and inverts it. Moreover, they are of varying quality. When Wilde observed that a cynic is a man 'who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing', that may or may not be true, but it does make you think. When Algernon says "All women become like their mothers; that is their tragedy. No man does; that is his" it doesn't.
More to the point, these epigrams are dispersed indiscriminately amongst the entire cast. In a good sitcom, the jokes are just as relentless but they are customised to the characters. Here, everyone talks in the same way and makes the same sort of jokes. Algernon is Wilde's voice in the play and he gets many of the best epigrams. That is fine, because they are entirely in keeping with his flippant, mildly cynical, character. But Jack gets his share too - as do Gwendolen, Cecily and even Lady Bracknell. In the end it all becomes a bit repetitive and predictable. Wilde wasn't that good at characters either.
If you enjoy this play (and despite my griping there is no reason why you shouldn't) then this 'no frills' production is the least fussy and most complete screen version I know of. For my part, I find ninety minutes of unremitting archness more than a bit wearing.
I give the final word to Jack:
"Was that clever? I am sick to death of cleverness. You can't go anywhere these days without meeting clever people. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left."
Jack, you said a mouthful there.
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