A Woman of No Importance review – Eve Best takes a feminist grip on Wilde's melodrama

Vaudeville, London
Best brings fierce emotional intensity, Eleanor Bron is a velvet-voiced aristo and Anne Reid delivers Victorian ballads in Dominic Dromgoole’s fine revival

A West End Oscar Wilde season, backed up by talks and lectures, is an excellent idea. It’s just a pity that it begins with a play that is neither Wilde’s first nor one of his best. The one big surprise about Dominic Dromgoole’s production, starring Eve Best and Anne Reid, is that it perks up no end the more the play dwindles into absurdity.

Wilde makes his intentions clear from the start when someone observes “the world is made for men, not for women”. We see this borne out through the social success of the cynical Lord Illingworth, who trades on his reputation for glibly phrased wickedness. But 20 years before, he had a son, Gerald, born out of wedlock to a woman who calls herself Mrs Arbuthnot. Where she has suffered for her sins, Lord Illingworth has got off scot-free and it is only when he proposes to take the boy on as his private secretary that she asserts her claims as a devoted mother and a wronged woman.

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from The Guardian http://ift.tt/2gp503C