The Peterborough Players are offering their audiences a generous helping of Oscar Wilde this week - with a bit of a difference.
Their current production is one of Wilde's lesser-known comedies, "An Ideal Husband."
Kevin Gardner has this review.
For theatergoers conditioned to Oscar Wilde by the exquisite trivialities of his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, the serious undercurrents of An Ideal Husband may come as something of a surprise.
Wilde takes on not just the antic dispositions of late Victorian British socialites, but also such weighty matters as political corruption and the differences between the ways men and women love.
It’s a lot to handle, but the Peterborough Players mostly succeed with an engrossing, if not always convincing, production.
An Ideal Husband’s plot is old-fashioned melodrama at its contrived best.
An up-and-coming member of Parliament, Sir Robert Chiltern, finds himself blackmailed by a mysterious scarlet woman, one Mrs. Cheveley.
She holds evidence of his involvement in a financial scandal.
Will Sir Robert resist her and destroy his career, or surrender to her demands and lose the love of his wife, who worships him as a paragon of rectitude?
Can his unlikely best friend, the foppish Lord Goring, help him?
Is Goring somehow connected to the unscrupulous Mrs. Cheveley?
And what about Sir Robert’s dependent younger sister, the ripely marriageable Miss Mabel? What’s to be done?!?
Director Gus Kaikkonen faces a real balancing act here.
Much of An Ideal Husband is conventional 19th century domestic melodrama, yet it’s also an expert Wildean parody of that genre.
Kaikkonen’s relatively sober treatment of the play’s social commentary sacrifices too much of Wilde’s parodic intention in the early going.
The result is that his production seems like two separate plays – a sudsy tearjerker before intermission, and a sitcom farce thereafter.
Fortunately, the excellent Peterborough cast seems capable of playing either style with equal skill.
Sure-handed performances abound here, from Jack Koenig’s repentant Sir Robert to the smiling malevolence of Dee Nelson’s Mrs. Cheveley.
Sevanne Martin and Karron Graves also shine as Lady Chiltern and Miss Mabel, respectively.
Kraig Swartz plays the flamboyant aesthete Lord Goring,,
He is a bit less comfortable with the period’s style and with his British accent.
But he makes the most of Wilde’s endless stream of delightfully perverse quips. “I love talking about nothing”, he declares at one point, “It is the only thing I know anything about.”
As usual at Peterborough, the production values are superior, including Mike Floyd’s elegant costumes and Eric Larson’s subtle lighting.
Charles F. Morgan’s magnificent set – a marble-colonnaded drawing room fronting two generous staircases running in opposite directions – make the modest Peterborough barn seem much larger than it really is.
An Ideal Husband will run at the Peterborough Players through August 10.
It may not capture every comic nuance of Wilde’s knotty, ambitious script, but it is well worth the trip.
For NHPR News, I’m Kevin Gardner.
