Theatre review: Lord Arthur Savile's Crime

Published on Tuesday 23 February 2010 18:08

LORD ARTHUR SAVILE'S CRIME *** KING'S THEATRE, EDINBURGH

IT'S OBVIOUS from the moment the lights go down that Christopher Luscombe's luscious little touring production of Lord Arthur Savile's Crime is not quite your ordinary costume classic. First, there's the set; a jolly little toy-theatre mock-up of a Victorian stage. Then there's the comely lady violinist in full costume, who swishes on to join her pianist, stage left; the music, it seems, is to be part of the action. A little sign tells us that the opening scene is called The Die Is Cast; then the violin strikes a melodramatic note, and off we romp, into Trevor Baxter's clever ten-scene adaptation of Oscar Wilde's 1891 short story, in which a young ass of an aristocrat is frightened by a society fortune-teller into believing he must fulfil a dreadful fate before he can marry his true love, Miss Sybil.

There's no point in pretending that the narrative stuff of Wilde's tale translates convincingly to the stage. Much of the drama is ridiculous, and captures the double quality of late-Victorian life – upper class and underworld, light and dark – much less memorably than contemporary stories like Stevenson's Jekyll And Hyde; emotionally, the action is much less powerful than the extracts from Wilde's own Ballad of Reading Gaol that divide the scenes.

As a masterclass in melodrama, though, the show is fascinating, marking out both the lost potential of the form – its vividness, its direct theatrical appeal, its foregrounding of star performers – and its tendency to strike modern audiences as pure send-up. The amazing Kate O'Mara enjoys herself far too much as Lady Windermere, young Lee Mead is impressive as Lord Arthur, Gary Wilmot turns in a commendably understated performance as the class outsider, Podger the palmist. And the lady violinist and her pianist provide emotional colour at the snap of each character's fingers; emphasising the artificiality of it all, and the fun.