The Importance of Being Earnest Reviews – National Theatre starring Ncuti Gatwa

"Doctor Who helps give Oscar Wilde's national treasure a witty reboot"

"The challenge for any director is, therefore, how to free the play from the moorings of its Victorian, deja-vu super-status and let it breathe. And, to his credit, Max Webster has done just that with a sparkling new production."

"Gatwa is a gloriously impertinent tease as 'ostentatiously eligible' Algernon, who follows his friend Jack Worthington to the country in search of marriage and mischief."

"Yes, liberties are taken. But that is surely the best way of blowing the dust off this national treasure. Besides, set and costume designer Rae Smith gives us eye-catching spectacles: a creamy Mayfair drawing room, a country garden, a capacious library in a stately home."

"Ncuti Gatwa leads a Wilde party of irresistible anarchic charm"

"Gatwa’s Algernon brings delightful mischief to a high-camp production pointing up the classic Victorian comedy’s subversive queerness"

"... the subtext of homoerotic desire that runs through this comedy of manners from 1895 has been well mined before now. But it is rarer to see Algernon whirling on to the stage in a hot pink gown, like Marilyn Monroe on acid, or Earnest camping it up with hand on hip. Or indeed, their love interests coming in for a same sex kiss."

"Max Webster’s luscious period dress production fuels this story of Algernon (Ncuti Gatwa, flamboyance personified), Jack (Hugh Skinner, comically vulnerable) and their secret identities with queer doubleness. Algernon is a cross-dresser. Jack might swing both ways. Both show up conventional masculinity to be nothing more than a performance."

"... there is an elegance to the nudge-wink references and it is a production with just the right amount of delightful mischief. It borrows its look from Bridgerton’s playbook and there are passing pop references (from musical strains of Snoop Dogg to a mention of the queer London club, Dalston Superstore) but despite its knowingness, there is a delicately judged balance between fidelity to Wilde’s text and 21st-century playfulness."

"Perhaps best of all, Sharon D Clarke’s Lady Bracknell is an exquisitely dressed battle-axe of African heritage, with a head-wrap beneath her enormous yellow hat, and outfits like the best of Bake Off’s show-stoppers. She is all fired up on class snobberies and fears around socialism, the hypocrisies of the Victorian upper-classes firmly sent up through her."

"With its dazzle, joy and original anarchic spirit of pantomime, this is the most stylish festive show in town."

"A bold and brash Wilde reboot"

"Doctor Who’s Ncuti Gatwa channels Liberace in this high-camp revival at the Lyttelton, National Theatre. It works — most of the time"

"Think of it as an adult panto. Max Webster’s bold and brash reboot of Oscar Wilde’s comedy rattles along with the help of oodles of camp and performances which, apart from Sharon D Clarke’s Jamaican-accented Lady Bracknell, are all nudge-nudge, wink-wink."

"... this is one of those National productions where you wonder if the director is throwing everything at the audience and hoping for the best. When it works, though, it’s a joy. Hugh Skinner makes an excellent Jack Worthing, forever shooting nervous glances at the audience as he sinks deeper and deeper into his subterfuges. This is comic acting of the highest order. Gatwa’s delivery lacks variation but he has great fun with the more outrageous costume changes, while Clarke’s granite-voiced old lady has all the haughtiness of a matron who has worked her passage into the upper rungs of society."

"Ncuti Gatwa is fabulous fun in an Oscar Wilde retelling"

"Max Webster’s superb cast anchors an innuendo-laden production that leans into slapstick and visual gags with relish"

"Ncuti Gatwa plays a gorgeously flamboyant Algernon who peacocks in silk corsets and ruffled negligees between scenes. And Sharon D Clarke shines as his formidable aunt Lady Bracknell, her Caribbean tones dripping with disapproval as his shenanigans upset the teacups."

"The genius of The Importance of Being Earnest is the way it takes the painful reality of life in the closet – with all its fake names, flimsy alibis and terror of discovery – and turns it into something flip and fun."

"Webster’s production is brilliant at slapstick and visual gags, tugging at every possible innuendo with schoolboy eagerness."

"What lingers here are the images, more than the words – perhaps because Wilde’s famous aphorisms sound especially glib when delivered with vigour, rather than their more usual laconic detachment."

"Ncuti Gatwa is on sublimely mischievous form leading the cast of this anarchically camp rewilding of Wilde"

"Describing Oscar Wilde’s most famous play as ‘camp’ is a bit like describing water as ‘a liquid’. Hell yes it’s camp... And yet it has to be said that Max Webster’s production is – by any reasonable standards – unusually, prodigiously, extremely gay."

"Certainly his acid-bright take doesn’t ‘make sense’ narratively. If it’s impossible to believe Algernon and Jack are straight – or even bi – it’s also impossible to grasp why exactly they’re going to such elaborate lengths to bag Cecily (Eliza Scanlen) and Gwendolen (Ronkę Adékoluéjó)."

"But if the leads are written as subtextually queer, then Webster’s approach is essentially to crank up the subtext to 11 and not worry about every aspect of internal logic so long as we’re having a good time. Which we very much are: handing the story over to its own cackling id and an ensemble of very beautiful, very charismatic, very funny actors, this Earnest could stand to be 15 minutes shorter but is otherwise a pure blast."

"The usual reactionary suspects will hate it. I loved it"

"Ncuti Gatwa stars in a fizzing production. Expect Bridgerton-style colourblind casting and sexual fluidity in this radical reinvention of a 19th-century classic."

"The usual reactionary suspects will hate it. I loved it because it honours Wilde’s wit but also his radicalism and his embrace of artifice. This is, after all, ostensibly hetero play by a gay writer about two men who invent identities to misbehave, and two women who construct fantasies to escape."

"There’s a knife-edge sense that these boys and girls could end up in any permutation – slightly perverse if you know the final twist. Algy’s butler and Jack’s steward are both played as scene-stealing oddballs by Julian Bleach(YES). Rae Smith’s designs for the London scenes are fairly staid, but her country sets suggest a Fragonard painting filtered through the heightened gay sensibility of Pierre et Gilles photos. Her costumes are out there: flower-printed suits and chiffon shirts for Algy, extravagant bustles and hairpieces for the girls."

"I’ve seen radical reinventions of this play that didn’t work. This one does. It’s great to see Ncuti Gatwa in it. But greater still to see a talented wider cast tearing up and reassembling Wilde."

"A flamboyant posh panto"
"The National Theatre's sparkling production shakes up Oscar Wilde's classic comedy - and leans into its permissiveness and same-sex attractions"

"What fun it is to see a “serious” theatre take Oscar Wilde’s “exquisitely trivial” 1895 comedy, as he himself called The Importance of Being Earnest, and shake it up a little bit."

"This exuberant production from Max Webster... delights before the lights have even gone down"

"Skinner in particular is a constant wonder. Sporting a mischievous moustache, he combines lovable man-about-town raffishness with the habit of slumping like a disconsolate child when subjected to a vicious verbal put-down by Lady B."

"The curtain call is a riot of flamboyant costumes, more glittery and colourful than any pantomime. This is a big success, oh yes it is."

"Ncuti Gatwa is a riot in this big bouncy castle of a show"

"Max Webster lands on Oscar Wilde’s glittering Victorian masterpiece – with the latest incumbent of the Tardis drawing the crowds"

"... while I don’t want to be a party-pooper, a slight sense of exhaustion set in watching his concertedly exuberant, subtext-declaring Earnest, which amply suits the gaiety of the panto season and has its moments but isn’t really one for the annals."

"Laying aside the fact that presenting a man in a pink dress as a model of (homo)sexual liberation might now be deemed passé, Gatwa’s performance – self-aware, preening, droll and camp – leaves you in little doubt as to where Algernon Moncrieff’s proclivities lie."

"... the main plaudits should go to Sharon D Clarke’s sedate, imperious, fabulously attired Lady Bracknell, with an incongruous Caribbean lilt and exactly the right kind of off-hand, understated delivery (half-growling “A handbag?”). She enables Wilde’s imperishable stock of convention-flipping epigrams to detonate and be answered with peals of laughter."

"Ncuti Gatwa and Sharon D Clarke in the National Theatre's party-like production"

"It’s panto season at the National Theatre. Max Webster’s production of Oscar Wilde’s most famous play is colourful, cross-dressing, brash and often very funny. The trouble is that the importance of its author sometimes vanishes in the mayhem."

"Wilde should seem effortless but here there’s a terrible sense of trying hard, emphasising every double entendre and inventing a few extra."

"... it is as if Webster, faced with his debut at the National, has decided to use every trick in the box and see what works. The result is outrageous, but only occasionally insightful and slightly less fun than it ought to be given the talent assembled on stage."

"Charm, cheek and flair"

"Flamboyantly queer take on Wilde’s well-loved comedy is arch, high-camp fun"

"Max Webster’s flamboyant revival makes its queerness full frontal, with an aesthetic of drag and high camp that pursues Wilde’s motifs of artifice and doubleness to their logical conclusion. Gender, it suggests, is both a construct and performative; no one involved in the self-conscious games depicted is for one millisecond in earnest."

"That studied air of triviality is a delicate mechanism in any production of this comedy, but by making his reading so arch – with actors who literally wink at the audience as they deliver aphorisms so familiar that we could recite them by heart – Webster raises the stakes. We’re not being invited to care about or invest in this world or its characters – so they had better be entertaining."

"Happily, they are, although there’s so much comic business that at times the pace perilously slackens... But there’s so much fizz and sparkle in the staging, and such charm, cheek and flair from the cast, that we’re consistently tickled and ultimately won over."

"This ‘Importance of Being Earnest’ Is a Fabulous Romp"

"A new production in London, starring Ncuti Gatwa, releases Oscar Wilde’s 1895 comedy from period convention and brings it stunningly into the 21st century."

"Purists may reach for their smelling salts at the National Theater’s wild revival of “The Importance of Being Earnest,” the Oscar Wilde comedy concerned with self-identity, veiled sexuality and forming “an alliance,” as one character drolly puts it, “with a parcel.” More adventuresome audience members, however, are likely to have a blast with this (often literally) unbuttoned take on a familiar text from the director Max Webster, who was a 2023 Tony nominee for “Life of Pi.”"

"Keeping one foot in the here and now, this “Earnest”... lands the verbal invention and wit of Wilde’s 1895 classic while incorporating contemporary music, the occasional swear word and a decidedly queer sensibility. At times, it may indulge in one wink at the audience too many — but even then, Webster’s intention is clearly to release a time-honored comedy from the confines of period convention."

"Gatwa’s mischievously flamboyant Algie is box-office catnip and the run is almost sold out largely on the strength of this likable actor’s onscreen success. But the emotional stakes reside in the wonderful Hugh Skinner’s Jack Worthing, the foundling whose desire for self-discovery provides a narrative through line among the characters’ aphorisms and observations."

"... it’s [Sharon D] Clarke as Lady Bracknell who lands the laughs — and big ones — whether opining about the French Revolution or the specifics of Britain’s railways, right up to the play’s climax"