The Importance of Being Earnest at the National Theatre review: Ncuti Gatwa stars in a fizzing production

Feverish excitement greeted the casting of Doctor Who himself, Ncuti Gatwa, arsenic Algernon successful Oscar Wilde’s classical 1895 comedy, but he’s not the main gully successful Max Webster’s fizzing, knockabout production. Don’t get maine wrong: he’s charming and charismatic arsenic the preening sybarite, tossing disconnected witticisms arsenic if they’re going retired of fashion.

But his outrageousness feels effortful alternatively than casual successful a staging that’s deliberately OTT. It opens with Gatwa successful a cutaway pinkish ballgown amid an evident orgy of resistance queens and kings. Though things get tamer astir immediately, Webster inactive tips the text’s implicit gayness into a heavier show of intersexual fluidity.

He edges his formed into panto territory with arch asides and occasional modern allusions. He besides takes Bridgerton-style colourblind casting to a fascinating caller level. The accustomed reactionary suspects volition hatred it. I loved it due to the fact that it honours Wilde’s wit but besides his radicalism and his clasp of artifice. This is, aft all, ostensibly hetero play by a cheery writer astir 2 men who invent identities to misbehave, and 2 women who conception fantasies to escape.

Algy and his person Jack (Hugh Skinner, immaculately twittish and sexually ambivalent, the surviving embodiment of chagrin) talk successful received pronunciation. But Algy’s haughty aunt Lady Bracknell (the magnificent Sharon D Clarke) has a Caribbean accent that turns retired to suit Wilde’s lines perfectly. I’ll lone ever perceive the operation “shilly-shallying” successful her dependable now. If anyone’s inactive harping connected astir Edith Evans’s intonation of the words “a handbag?” 70 years ago, hide it. There’s a caller Lady B successful town.

Quicksilver histrion Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo – ever different, ever stunning – is each Victorian propriety 1 minute, each modern raunch the next, arsenic Lady Bracknell’s girl and Jack’s emotion involvement Gwendolen. She enjoys a narration that’s friendly, past spiky, past seemingly successful flagrante with Cecily (pert and snarky Eliza Scanlen), Jack’s ward whom Algy comes to covet.

There’s a knife-edge consciousness that these boys and girls could extremity up successful immoderate permutation – somewhat perverse if you cognize the last twist. Algy’s butler and Jack’s steward are some played arsenic scene-stealing oddballs by Julian Bleach(YES). Rae Smith’s designs for the London scenes are reasonably staid, but her state sets suggest a Fragonard coating filtered done the heightened cheery sensibility of Pierre et Gilles photos. Her costumes are retired there: flower-printed suits and chiffon shirts for Algy, extravagant bustles and hairpieces for the girls.

There are references to Miley Cyrus and James Blunt, 1 “sh*t” and 1 “f**ksake!” There’s besides a knowingness to it all, from the handbag suspended implicit the opening curtain to actors acknowledging their dialog is covering a country change.

I’ve seen extremist reinventions of this play that didn’t work. This 1 does. It’s large to spot Ncuti Gatwa successful it. But greater inactive to spot a talented wider formed tearing up and reassembling Wilde.