Wilde's snobbish side

Adrian Noble's limp production of this creaky melodrama by Oscar Wilde reveals what a reactionary, morally unpleasant play it is. Even the famous epigrams - wanly delivered - do not work their usual magic. And Peter McKintosh's sparse, green, threadbare sets never evoke country house grandeur. Noble, in failing to provide a clear satirical and social framework and in allowing actors grossly to revel in the purple of the melodramatic prose, exposes the play's thematic shortcomings. Wilde may have been a socialist, but A Woman of No Importance succumbs to snobbery. It flattered upper-class theatregoers by making the upper-crust characters dispensers of outrageous wit and models of elegance and style.

A substantial portion of the play is devoted to titled ladies and their friends brooding over men, marriage and morals, which they and Wilde never manage to take very seriously, or indeed morally. But these performers, with the exception of Caroline Blakiston's splendid, vinegary Lady Caroline, are not blessed with the Wildean high style. Prunella Scales's forgetful Lady Hunstanton beams no bright light. Elizabeth Garvie's Lady Stutfield pulls silly, distracting faces and Joanne Pearce's would-be wicked lady, Mrs Allonby, bolsters her aimless role by heavy flirting with Rupert Graves's cynical, randyish, dandyish Lord Illingworth. Graves is a fine actor, but the aristocracy is no more within his range than it was in Thora Hird's. In voice, manner and deportment he appears a determined upper-class impersonator.

The frail, intermittent plotline depends upon Mrs Arbuthnot, an impoverished woman with a past in the shape of an illegitimate son, Gerald, poised to become secretary to Lord Illingworth, who happens to be his unacknowledged father. Will mother or father win the young man? Instead of following the contemporary, female liberation lead of Ibsen, Wilde, whose homosexuality sometimes made him more sympathetic to transgressors, implicitly endorsed the traditional idea that single mothers like Mrs Arbuthnot are "tainted", deserve disgrace and cannot escape a lifetime's ignominy.

The prim American Puritan, Hester, in Rachel Stirling's ranting tones becomes the play's moral arbiter. A black-velveted Mrs Arbuthnot looks daggers and is ridiculously played by Samantha Bond as a tragedy queen revelling in quavers, sobs, passions and Wilde's piffling melodramatic tosh. Julian Ovenden's Gerald makes a valiant show of realism when not swamped by these two preposterous performances and Wilde's old-fashioned social dogma.

Until 24 January. Box office: 020 7930 8800.

Woman Of No Importance