Christmas is coming and Max Webster's over the top treatment of this most familiar of comedies may be as close as The National Theatre gets to panto.
Oscar Wilde had to smuggle his queerness past Victorian audiences via dazzling coded witticisms about marriage and bachelordom.
But Webster's cast, headed by charismatic Dr Who star Ncuti Gatwa and sporting Rae Smith's gorgeously vibrant costumes, kick the closet door down from the off, and proceed to wink at, tongue, and dry hump each other.
A prologue finds a giddy whirl of cross dressing and partying with Gatwa's Algernon at the piano in pink dress and heels, evoking the double life of London's queer society in Wilde's day.
A vivid red velvet curtain swishes down and we're into the play proper, except with mugging, ribald slapstick comedy, audience asides, and snatches of contemporary songs from Miley Cyrus to James Blunt's You're Beautiful.
It's all frothy and entertaining but not as funny as it hopes it is. Sure it rescues Wilde's overfamiliar play from cliche, but his brilliantly constructed plotting and dialogue - about two naughty bachelors who invent double lives but are found out when they fall for smart, feisty women - becomes drowned out by the clown show.
The play's stakes are framed within a heightened comedy of manners, but by amping the camp and loud hailing the homoerotic subtext, it makes no sense why Gatwa's flamboyantly arch Algy or Hugh Skinner's doltish, twitchy Jack are so keen to get married.
And Gwendolyn (Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́) and Cecily's (Cecily) same sex kiss is chucked in with little relation to lines or character.
In fairness Skinner is a brilliant physical comic who grows into the role of the vulnerable foundling abandoned in a handbag.
Leaning into the vibe, Smith's design framed by a gleaming proscenium arch, helps Webster almost get away with it - creating a world that resembles a technicolour movie with the final walk down costumes a glorious hoot.
But it's Sharon D Clarke's precisely spoken, gorgon Lady Bracknell, a still point amid the farcical goings on, and Amanda Lawrence, and Richard Cant as Miss Prism and Canon Chasuble, who calibrate their performances to play Wilde's witticisms as written and are all the better for it.
Clarke's Caribbean matriarch steals the show. Here it's less her disdainful delivery of 'a handbag,' that brings the house down, than her particular pronunciation of cucumber sandwiches.
At The National Theatre until January 25, 2005.
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