Theatre review: An Ideal Husband

The National Theatre's recent Importance of Being Earnest found a new angle by introducing a formidable Caribbean take on Lady Bracknell, and now Nicholai La Barrie extends that idea by giving us another Oscar Wilde play where the entire cast of characters has been reimagined as first or second generation Caribbean British. In An Ideal Husband class, power and money are constantly intertwined in a relationship that proves precarious as Lord Chiltern (Chiké Okonkwo,) a politician whose career benefited from his personal wealth, gets blackmailed about the source of that wealth: The unscrupulous Mrs Cheveley (Aurora Perrineau) has obtained a letter proving that, at the start of his career, he benefited from his parliamentary knowledge to do a bit of insider trading. She has an investment project of her own on the go, and if Chiltern publicly endorses what is very obviously a scam, she'll keep his secret.

Before worrying about the truth becoming known to the world at large, Chiltern's first concern is what the news will do to his beloved wife Gertrude (Tamara Lawrance,) and turns to his best friend for advice.

Jamael Westman gets his teeth into the most dandyish character even in an Oscar Wilde play, and his bisexual-coded Lord Goring takes great delight in flirting with pretty much everyone, but is also appealingly genuine in his love and protective instinct for his friends. Westman has an entertainingly bitchy take on Wilde's famous epigrams, but his funniest scenes are those with Chiltern's younger sister Mabel, whom he intends to propose to when he can be bothered to get round to it. Tiwa Lade's giggly, enthusiastically girlish performance sparks well off his mannered nonchalance.

The production's Caribbean conceit is probably most effective in Goring's relationship with his father the Earl of Caversham (Jeff Alexander,) whose constant grumpiness reflects his disappointment at his son's determination to do absolutely nothing with the power and status he's secured for him. It's generally a fun evening although it does falter in the second act - Wilde going to a darker dramatic place while still insisting on filling the script with bitchy bon mots is a tonal dissonance La Barrie never quite finds a way around.

There's also an imbalance between the performances that sucks some of the energy out of the room: Lyric Hammersmith audiences tend to be loud in the best way - that of being properly invested in the action - and they were not holding back at the interval about Perrineau's stilted performance. It stands out particularly as everyone else in the cast is throwing everything into a heightened, borderline drag queen performance style to milk every laugh from the show in Rajha Shakiry's attention-grabbing costumes, from Suzette Llewellyn and Nimmy March's gossipy aunties to Sule Thelwell's destined-for-disappointment suitor to Mabel.

Even the Chilterns' almost entirely silent butler seems to have an unspoken storyline of his own being told, with his employers a little bit terrified of Emmanuel Akwafo's furiously flouncing Mason. Once the tone shifts radically again into outright farce for the third act the evening gains momentum again, so while there are a couple of things holding the show back from quite soaring, it does offer a lot of moments of brightness.

An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde is booking until the 6th of June at the Lyric Hammersmith, and from the 10th to the 20th of June at Bristol Old Vic.

Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.