I love Wilde, and I love The Importance of Being Earnest, because it is extraordinarily clever. For all its outrageousness, it is also beautifully subtle, dependent on the interplay between what is said, what is meant, and what remains unspoken. Wilde’s innuendos are powerful precisely because they remain unresolved, allowing different audiences to perceive different plays simultaneously.

In this production, that subtlety was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the interpretation. Its loud, exuberant theatricality did not release the comedy so much as drown it out. I often found myself laughing because I remembered what was coming, rather than because the moment itself had landed. Added gestures, falls, kisses, and broad physical jokes repeatedly competed with Wilde’s words. His epigrams are so much more than decorative one-liners. When performers signal the joke too strongly, the line becomes a demonstration of outrageousness rather than an outrageous truth delivered with complete innocence. Wilde is funniest when his characters treat absurdities as impeccable common sense.

Yet that excess seems to arise from the production’s central assumption: that Wilde’s queerness has been obscured for so long by conservative performance traditions that a modern production must compensate by making it relentlessly explicit. In my view, however, concealment is one of the play’s organising principles. The opening queer party presents the hidden world directly to the audience, but in doing so it implies that the social pressures which made secrecy necessary no longer exist. Jack and Algernon’s alternative identities only have meaning because society cannot accommodate them.

By turning implication into declaration, the production loses nuance. Queerness comes to dominate everything, whereas Bunburying is richer and more expansive than any single interpretation. It can signify sexual secrecy, certainly, but it also captures the divide between public duty and private desire, the invention of identity through language, and the liberating possibilities of make believe. Wilde’s achievement is that all these meanings coexist. Once one of them is made definitive, the others become harder to see.