The play that gets Oscar Wilde right

The Importance of Being Oscar
Jermyn Street Theatre, London until, April 19

If things hadn’t gone so spectacularly pear-shaped for Oscar Wilde – the disastrous libel action over the suggestion he might not be an entirely red-blooded heterosexual – he almost certainly wouldn’t have developed into such an interesting writer and human being. That’s the central thesis of Micheal Mac Llammoir’s The Importance of Being Oscar.

Alastair Whatley, in the title role, grows in the role before our eyes. Witty, flippant but unapologetically shallow in the first act, his fall from grace in the second invests him with a real depth in the second.

The Jermyn Street Theatre is peculiarly exposing for actors – they are more or less sitting in the laps of the punters in the front row – but Whatley, on his own on the small stage for two hours, turns it into a personal triumph in Michael Fentiman’s production.

It helps that he is working with such a great script and it makes so much more of the comedy to be had in scenes that were woefully squandered in Stephen Fry’s dire 1997 drama Wilde, such as the playwright’s experience lecturing redneck audiences on an American lecture tour.

Funny, sad, thoughtful but always entertaining – like Wilde himself – this is a gem of a production. This little venue shows once again that, when it comes to theatre, size isn’t everything.