The play is brilliant and deserves a real artistic and creative production. It would be a crime to update it to any modern times. Too many scenes, sequences, and remarks are so dated that they could become incomprehensible if shifted to our modern times. The BBC chose then to remain as close as possible to what it could have been when it was written and first produced. It is quite obvious that smartphones in such a situation would sink the whole thing down to some underworld of anachronism. The BBC is also excellent in such productions: settings, real settings, costumes, and every single small detail. They are also extremely good at both speaking in a normal and rather fast way, but they remain all the time comprehensible, clear, and understandable. That means great acting.
Of course the story is a pure comedy, but a social comedy among the upper classes of Great Britain in a time when being an aristocrat was nearly better than being rich, but being only rich and not in any way an aristocrat, no matter how little, was unacceptable in this class of people who all have been educated in some very closed and selective public schools or universities, meaning, of course, they are private and exclusively reserved to the well-born, meaning those with some title and some money, one title is generally enough but a lot of money is needed on the other side, plus a country mansion and a town residence on a good street or place.
At the same time, we are thinking - automatically because we have an education, maybe not from Oxford but an education nevertheless - of Shakespeare's comedies with all sorts of multiple weddings and marriages, generally four to reach perfection. Oscar Wilde does not go that far and only puts three on the stage. Then you have tens of sentences you know by heart, because you have an education, maybe not from ..., never mind, and they are still slightly funny like the poor cat that turns into a spade, or some nasty remark about being born in a "handbag" of some size mind you that looks more like a portmanteau to me, in Victoria Station. So, it is funny but more enjoyable than just excruciating funny ah ah without any end, with a lot of laughter and instinctual un-mental and ornamentally demonstrative pleasure.
In the end, you may wonder if it is still like that in a way or another, and you may come to the conclusion that nothing has changed really and that "I may call a cell phone a cell phone" but no one will ever retort "What is a cell phone?" Shucks! Yet if you said "I call a refugee a refugee," no one will wonder "What in hell is that, a refugee?" In our information society we know even what Indians in Amazonia are, think, how they live, the languages they speak, and particularly what their future is, and be sure one person out of ten, or maybe out of five, may care about that future without any guaranteed duration.
Enjoy the Dandy-Forever Oscar Wilde and do not let him make you think the world is not really worth living, even if it means touristing around from one prison to the next and ending up in Reading writing some longish ballad.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
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