The Importance of Being Serious Review – Gloriously Mad Opera Reaches New Heights of Delirium | Opera

AAnyone who has ever seen an opera will recognize the long rack of white dinner plates, stacked and set out to see what you know. Anyone familiar with Oscar Wilde’s play will recognize its lines, which composer Gerald Barry turned into a kind of staccato mash-up of speech and song. But in Jack Furness’s new production of Barrie’s The Importance of Being Earnest at Garsington Opera, familiarity is otherwise avoided.

Barry has already transformed Wilde’s “frivolous comedies for serious people” into what he calls “a delirious opera.” The singing provides another layer of perversity, the orchestral score another source of intelligence, and gives the stage works an extra level of goofiness. Ference’s extras include a grand piano on stilts, a kangaroo that meets a bad end, a huge chaise longue (which suffers one of the play’s mystery explosions during dinnertime), a dirt floor, a working hose to allow the heroes to be alternately smeared with mud and soaked, and a herd of miniature cows. The result is a kind of hyperactive nightmare, slowed by all the shocking efforts, and turned sour by the comedy.

Hannah Wolff’s crazy cool costume designs stand out in the dark. Algernon wears a tie with his silk pajamas, Gwendolen wears highly structured dresses that play subtly with 1890s silhouettes, and Miss Prism wears walking trousers and sensible shoes with her elegant, late-Victorian updo. Sicily’s clothes are hysterically brocade and uniformly pink.

It was perhaps inevitable that Lady Bracknell’s appearance should have elicited the loudest laughter of the evening. Played by Henry Waddington, a regular bass player from Garsington, she boasts a sharp gray haircut, red lipstick, and a beard. She first appears in a pantsuit, then later in what I can only describe as a Bismarck-Joyce-dominatrix, complete with shiny latex cape and military helmet, keeping a gun in her Thatcherite handbag. Waddington’s ability to navigate a deadpan was vital, as was his mesmerizing stage presence and astonishing facility with words in both English and German.

The cast was otherwise a veritable collection of diva actors. As for Sean Boylan’s Algernon, Zahid Siddiqui’s Jack, and Holly Brown’s Gwendolyn, the tight orchestration, excellent diction and ability to spit tea on demand mostly outweighed conventional tone production work – although Jennifer France’s Cecily squeaked and shrieked as only a really good soprano could. Susan Bickley was strangely poignant as Miss Prism, Kevin Whately was a warm star as Dr. Chasuble’s talking head, and Peter Leadbeater was a delight as the long-suffering, plate-smashing butler a masterpiece of comedic timing.

Douglas Boyd conducted a subset of the Philharmonia Orchestra (on stage throughout) in a highly nuanced retelling of Barry’s score, sharply humored and all. If the Furness production saw the laughs dwindle, this opera’s latest outing is welcome evidence that it has achieved that holy grail of contemporary musical theatre: life after the premiere.