Their identity solidifies in how they are seen, this group of women posing for the world, for each other, for themselves. Sir John Pontefract scurries about with a flash camera, taking one shot here and another there, and their demeanor remains constant from the one for film and the one for society. Their spines and their glances are starched. Their world is what they seem- fashion-heavy, skin deep –as if they, like their stylish dresses, were designed as an abstraction of some kind. Their chat has no anchor in a consequential world –“She is very well-born, the niece of….” —that sort of thing.
Of course we hear “English women conceal their feelings until they are married,” we hear that if one gets a desirable position, then things out of reach may be hoped for. In any case, one is supposed to gossip and look right and say the right thing. Lady Hunstanton does and every awkward moment, every lull, is instinctively repaired by appropriate words. Lord Illingworth and Mr. Kelvil, M.P. converse with a slight backward lean in their posture. When they walk they seem to glide. Lady Stutfield is excessively polite and behaves as if she has been squeezed very hard by social convention. Mrs. Allonby, seated in her instinctive sprawl, seems she would welcome a squeeze wherever it might come from.
This is Oscar Wilde of 1893 set in 1951 and the new date is quite made to measure. Indeed, Lady Hunstanton’s remark -“politics are in a sad way everywhere I am told, they certainly are in England”- is certainly right on for our time as well as Wilde’s. It receives some laughs and dribbling of applause. And we constantly hear why. “Only fashion is serious” says Lord Illington, ergo superficiality rules. When Lady Stutfield agrees with every pontification about purity from Mr. Kelvil’s mouth, we witness women willingly subservient to a dominating male culture.
“Nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humour in the woman” according to Lord Illingworth and we sense, both laughable and cruel, a male dominance persecuting even those who laugh. And, bless Oscar Wilde, into this setting of no consequence comes the ironically labeled woman of no importance, dressed not in the distracting colours of surface fashion but instead in the colour of a battered human heart. It is unrelenting black, the price one pays in a smug social structure.
But, lest we forget the superficiality of these folk, scene two opens with Sir John again photographing the ladies in their long fanning dresses. We become aware that each woman is postured and showing a pose every minute. We become aware that our photographs, as Wilde constantly tells us, prove we are constantly putting on the show that is inherent to our species. Again Lady Hunstanton, ever-ready with a comment both functional and unflappable, observes that happy marriages are “remarkably rare nowadays.” Again we see Lady Stutfield, wide eyed with a tight bright smile, as if she might snap from doing the right thing.
While marriage for Lord Illington is summarized that a husband should just “pay bills and compliments,” Mrs. Allonby wraps herself around anything in sight, like something of a tempting serpent. So in this blend of male-serving social rigidity, unapologetic but also rare sensuality, we now meet Miss Hester from America, she with an almost back slapping manner that is seen as “painfully natural.” Hers is another world and she declares “You don’t know how to live.” Thus she tells these “shallow, selfish, foolish” ladies and we sense again how much the newly entered and very subdued Mrs. Arbuthnot has paid dearly for the life she did not intend to live. Yes, the smugly opinionated Lord Illington has “ruined” her life by giving her a son but not a marriage. But this is not a society that cares.
Scene three features an old boy’s milieu with Sir John taking pics of the men at billiards. It is in such a world that the son, Gerald, is quite taken by the self-possessed manner of Lord Illington who has offered him a post as personal secretary. As with the ladies, everything said seems to have little impact on anyone, since social walls seem as thick as each speaker’s skull. The divide between the sexes feels palpably made of hypocrisy and stone. And from all this a socially shamed mother has had to protect her illegitimate son for 20 years during which he has remained innocent and naïve.
Setting Wilde’s play in 1951, a time of conservative government and Dior fashion and stifling social inertia, is incisively appropriate. For beneath all the patronizing complacency there is much unrest, much barely concealed brutality, and as in Wilde’s time social hypocrisy prevails. Yes, the fifties, with the Korean War, McCarthyism, Hungary, the Cold war, and racial rebellion. Eda Holmes’ take on Wilde therefore reveals a thin social veneer on much decay then and now.
People are ruined or rotting from the old values and grabbing for new ones as they cling to the old. Gerald insists that his mother marry Illingworth who abandoned her and gallingly maintain values that almost destroyed her. “The woman suffers, the man goes free,” she says. And what resolution does the second half offer with all of this? It is one of wounded beauty. The system wins, but not the whole game, we find.
Fiona Byrne’s Mrs. Arbuthnot is a quietly breathtaking performance that is painful to watch. She feels stained but knows also that “women are hard on each other,” knows that whatever religion says is a “hideous mockery.” But she also embodies Wilde’s deeply touching summation of a mother’s profound caring for her young. Indeed she has Gerald “too much in my heart”, he being the son that for the mother “feels my dishonor”. Meanwhile, Illingworth still sees women as the “prettiest of playthings” but he does receive a solid slap when he becomes too condescending and vindictive. After all, he is, in a few audience-satisfying words, “a man of no importance.”
Such is the sadly limited but very satisfying resolution to this critique of Wilde’s society. This gripping production doesn’t waver and it unsettles as much as it entertains, for we experience an unmovable emptiness in these entertaining people. We feel it especially hard because these are thoroughly realized performances from this Shaw Company, all guided and supported with masterly skill by director Holmes and her imaginative technical staff. An excellent production all round that proves now is then and then is now.