Lady Windermere’s Fan
Canberra Repertory Society, 10 – 25 September
Reviewed by Naomi Milthorpe
When Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan first premiered in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the things it explored would have been quite risqué. Infidelity and sexuality were (at least in the common understanding of Victorian society) things not to be spoken of, which may be the reason Wilde – gnomic purveyor of the salacious drawing room witticism – seems so coy in this play. His characters – the painfully young and puritanical Lady Windermere (Zoë Tuffin) and her stitched-up husband Lord Windermere (Ross Walker) – tiptoe around all but the cleanest of subjects, allowing the audience and the more dynamic characters Lord Darlington (Adrian Flor), Mrs Erlynne (Christa de Jager) and the Duchess of Berwick (Liz Bradley) to smile archly, twitter knowingly, and generally feel superior (an emotion Saint Oscar himself was very likely familiar with).
Wilde’s fin-de-siecle comedy of manners, in which the gauche Lady Windermere is led to believe that: a) her husband is having an affair with the fallen woman Mrs Erlynne, and b) that the appropriate response to such news is to elope with Lord Darlington (he of ‘I can resist everything but temptation’ fame) rather than to tell Lord W to foot it, is in this version updated by Tony Turner and the folks at Rep – but not totally.
Turner is cognisant of the play’s general outmodedness; the manners and mores of Victorian society do not fully mesh with our own. (Having said that, if I found out that my spouse was giving large sums of money to women of dubious repute, who he then insisted I invite to my own birthday party, I’d probably chuck a tizzy, too). Turner does not, however, simply plant Lady Windermere et al in 21st Century London, along with F-book, Twitter, and iPhones. To bridge the gap between Wilde’s world and our own, Turner has set the show in the entre deux guerres period, complete with bobs and dropped waists on the ladies and a monolithic modernist set done in sorbet colours, courtesy of Quentin Mitchell.
The cast do a fine job of capturing the moral ambiguities of Wilde’s script. I confess I enjoyed the bad characters far more than I enjoyed the good ones: Bradley’s Duchess was zestfully delicious, while de Jager’s Mrs Erlynne combined complicity and sass in a winning performance. Jerry Hearn was another delight as the crusty, baffled Lord Augustus. I must also confess that, having retained the upper-class English setting, I do wish that Turner had made a bit of extra effort with some of his actors in retaining the upper-class English accent, but this is a minor quibble. The costumes are sumptuous, the players attractive, and the Repertory crowd has a grand old time - which makes me think of Wilde’s apparent words after the first performance:
“Ladies and Gentlemen. I have enjoyed this evening immensely. The actors have given us a charming rendition of a delightful play, and your appreciation has been most intelligent. I congratulate you on the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself.”