Lady Windermere's Fan

by Oscar Wilde

seen by live streaming from the Vaudeville Theatre on 20 March 2018

Dominic Dromgoole has created a theatre company to perform all of Oscar Wilde's social comedies and some associated works; this is the second major production (after A Woman of No Importance). Kathy Burke directs Grace Molony as Lady Windermere, Joshua James as Lord Windermere, Samantha Spiro as Mrs Erlynne and Jennifer Saunders as the Duchess of Berwick.

Wilde uses the conventions of a melodrama to skewer social pretensions and at the same time to criticise unthinking adherence to moral absolutes. Mrs Erlynne is the catalyst for a crisis in the Windermere marriage. But most of the crisis is played out according to the mores of the time - the wife virtuous and condemnatory of social and ethical impropriety, the husband floundering in his attempts to do what's best in a situation where his natural presumption of masculine authority collides with his entrapment in blackmail. Curiously, although the audience is soon aware of the secret causing all the mayhem, Lady Windermere remains oblivious and some other major deceptions are also not unmasked.

This tangle of misunderstanding allows Wilde to mock the moral certainties of the social scene, and the blithe superficiality of social judgements. There is ample opportunity for the display of his trademark wit in sharp epigrams and banter. The play does not have the sure-footed sophistication of his masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest but it shows Wilde working towards that gem. In this play the plot creaks a bit and the attitudinising of the Windermeres can be wearing, while the real pain of Mrs Erlynne's situation jars with the general atmosphere.

The performances were good, and the period setting acceptable, though the brief vignette of the butler flirting with a male guest at the ballroom, and the inexplicable appearance of the lady's maid with soot smuts on her face (which would have earned instant dismissal in any well-regulated household) were misjudgements of tone. Jennifer Saunders as the Duchess of Berwick was obviously a draw card, though the character appears only in the first half of the play. In a role very similar to Lady Bracknell's in the more famous play, she epitomised the kind of social snobbery that Wilde loved to mock. During a scene change in between Acts 3 and 4 she and some musicians performed a saucy music hall song in front of the scene drop, which was very amusing but completely out of character.