Observer, 22 April 1990, by Michael Coveney
-----------------------------------------------------------

Frayn may have had in mind the fact that  Oscar Wilde, on 
the first night of his first success, "Lady Windermere's 
Fan," took the stage and drawlingly congratulated the 
audience on its own performance, "which persuades me that 
you think *almost* as highly of the play as I do myself." A 
fine new production at the Bristol Old Vic by the Canadian 
opera director Robert Carsen, designed in a tall cream 
morning-room by Anthony Ward, confirms the Richard Ellmann 
view of the play as the author's most brilliant dramatic 
confection of disguise and masked identity. The verbal 
swordplay becomes weaponry of defence, not attack.

Only Philip Prowse among recent directors of this 
scintillating piece has dared--triumphantly--to return to 
Wilde's original intention of withholding from the audience 
until the last act the true nature of Lady Windermere's 
relationship with Mrs. Erlynne, the "woman with a past" 
(Wilde was deflected off course by his importunate producer, 
George Alexander, the man also responsible for throwing out 
far too much baby with the bath water of the four-act 
"Importance").

At Bristol, the mysterious duet is played by two gazelles at 
bay: Maggie Steed as Mrs. Erlynne, wearing a badge of public 
disgrace as a passport to the forbidden emotional and social 
hinterland; and Joely Richardson as Lady Windermere; far too 
casually articulated, but superbly suspended between the 
equally attractive high grounds of a splendid adulterous 
passion and a moral married indignation.

A great opportunity is missed to make of the pushy 
Australian entrepreneur a totally recognisable figure, but 
everything else about this play throbs with relevance, if 
that's what you want. It's snobbish, brittle, obsessed with 
people's idea of themselves, yet openly critical of 
respectability and materialism, and underpinned with an idea 
that a life endured in speculation is of less value than one 
transfigured by sacrifice.



-----------------------------------------------------------
                     Bentley's Bedlam
            http://www.BetsyDa.com/bedlam.html

This website is for information and entertainment purposes only 
and is not intended to infringe on copyrights held by others.