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A Woman of No Importance, Vaudeville Theatre, London, review: Eve Best is wonderfully moving

Eve Best as Mrs Arbuthnot in 'A Woman of No Importance': Marc Brenner
Eve Best as Mrs Arbuthnot in 'A Woman of No Importance': Marc Brenner

With his spirited and splendidly cast revival of A Woman of No Importance, Dominic Dromgoole launches two intriguing projects. The production inaugurates Clear Spring, his new company which is dedicated to celebrating the work of “proscenium playwrights” in the picture-frame theatres for which they wrote. This is quite a change of scene for the man whose excellent ten-year tenure as artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe demonstrated such an imaginative embrace of very different theatrical architecture. The show is also the first instalment in his year-long season of Oscar Wilde plays in the West End.

It's a bold opener because A Woman of No Importance, first seen in 1893, is nobody's favourite in this author's oeuvre. Producers are put off by the sixteen-strong company it exorbitantly requires. Critics complain about its “broken-backed” nature. To begin with, the piece is all fluted epigrams and tea cups on a country house terrace. Then, towards the end of the first half, it plunges into melodrama that may have impeccable motives – the exposure of the Victorian double standards applied to the sexual behaviour of men and women – but that uses methods more associated in tone with Mrs Henry Wood and East Lynne than with A Doll's House: a “Fallen” Woman, a long-kept Secret, a Revelation – “He is your own father!”.

The received wisdom is that Wilde didn't get the balance right between epigrammatic comedy and melodrama until he realised that the only thing to do with the latter was to mock it – which he achieved in his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest. The great thing about Dromgoole's revival of this earlier play is that, if the balance still seems a bit awkward, the production makes a signal success of both aspects. To indicate the enduring relevance of the piece (hot now because of the Harvey Weinstein scandal), the director does not need to resort to any updating (Jonathan Fensom's lovely country house designs root the show in its period). By playing the central story for it enduring tragic truth and muting some of the more exclamatory attitudinising, Dromgoole brings an Ibsenite bite to the proceedings. And the ping-pong of Wildean bon mots – that can, in bad productions of this work, make you feel as if you are witnessing as a collection of statues elocuting into a void— is played with real force of personality by a cast of de luxe performers including Eleanor Bron and Emma Fielding.

Stunning in black velvet, Eve Best is wonderfully moving as Mrs Arbuthnot, the “woman” of the title who struggles to prevent her beloved son taking up a diplomatic career with the cad who, twenty years back, fathered and abandoned him She is in a cruelly no-win situation. She can either let the boy go go off, in all innocence, with Dominic Rowan's cold, quipping rotter of a Lord Illingworth or she can dash his prospects and destroy his illusions about the kind of withdrawn life they have been leading. There's an unshowy, heartfelt intensity to Best's performance that throbs with emotional accuracy. When her immature, moralising son (vividly played by Harry Lister Smith) proposes that she now marry the rake who ruined her, she laughs out loud as a way of not crying at the grotesqueness of his thinking that this a viable solution after all she has been through. Instead of the angular semaphore of melodrama, we get beautifully observed, realistic detail from her so that when Mrs Arbuthnot gathers her strangth and finally slaps the repulsively complacent Lord across his face, the gesture carries some of the cathartic charge of Nora slamming that door.

Anne Reid is sublimely funny as the vague, scatterbrained Lady Hunstanton who typically recalls how Lady Belton eloped with a lover: “poor Lord Belton died three afterwards of joy. Or gout, I forget which”. Even more hilarious in the scene where her character is slightly songs, Reid is a joy warbling the entr-acte songs which are a novel and attractive feature of this production. A great start to a season that will continue with Kathy Burke directing Jennifer Saunders in Lady Windermere's Fan.