On the way in which into the theatre there's a pop-up show of Victorian photographic portraits. The sitters are stiff in that sluggish shutter-speed approach, holding their gaze of their high hats, frock coats and crinolines. They're all folks of color and, because the curators have it, are a “lacking chapter”.
The Black Chronicles exhibition by London gallery Autograph is an effective introduction to this staging of Oscar Wilde’s high-society comedy. Director Denzel Westley-Sanderson has taken a chunk of historically white tradition and claimed it as his personal. Like the images, his manufacturing for English Touring Theatre, Leeds Playhouse and the Rose theatre has all of the acquainted options of The Significance of Being Earnest: the superficiality, the snootiness and the epigrammatic wit. It simply occurs to be carried out by an all-black forged.
And a humorous ensemble they're too. In a manufacturing commissioned after he received the RTST Sir Peter Corridor director award, Westley-Sanderson pays consideration to the formality of Oscar Wilde’s genteel world of afternoon tea and cucumber sandwiches whereas giving it a playful kick. When the characters can’t get what they need, they have an inclination to chase one another on and off the stage, as if they've slipped right into a slapstick farce. It's as if the tweed fits and unyielding clothes can not fairly restrain the naughty kids carrying them.
Solely the imposing determine of Girl Bracknell can carry them to order. Performed by Daniel Jacob, moonlighting from his job as drag queen Vinegar Strokes, she is so wrapped up in swathes of purple cloth that Phoebe Campbell’s Cecily can get nowhere close to her face and has to make do with an air kiss. When she speaks, it's with a rasping authority.
The knockabout video games and up-front perspective imply not all of Wilde’s witticisms land as they might with extra icy reserve. However there's compensation sufficient within the entertaining turns from Abiola Owokoniran as a camp and conversational Algernon, Justice Ritchie as an out-of-his-depth Jack and Adele James as a sexually forthright Gwendolen.
At Leeds Playhouse till 17 September. On tour till 12 November.
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