Lady Winderemere’s Fan at the Shaw festival: Hinton gives a stunninng production.

It’s said that Oscar Wilde was the first person to become famous for being famous. The author/playwright whose own affair with Lord Alfred Douglas created a scandal that surpassed any he wrote about in his plays, was known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and sparkling conversation. Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day.

Photo: by Emily Cooper. L to R: Tara Rosling, Gray Powell, Marla McLean.  Reviewed by Jeniva Berger, www.scenechanges.com

But it wasn’t until his first "society comedy’ in 1895 that his playwriting career got a kick start. Lady Winderemere’s Fan, subtitled A Play About a Good Woman, was the first of four significant plays of Wilde and marked the beginning of his real stature as a playwright of consequence. Its current production at the Shaw Festival directed by Peter Hinton, lights up the Festival Stage in delicious hues and dark edges.

A play of manners and morals in Victorian English high society, Hinton gives us a stunning introduction to the play before it begins, with four of the female actors with fans rotating poses like Greek statues in front of the curtain. Beguiling, coy, imperious, alluring, the 19th century lady’s fan was a versatile tool that did far more than any ordinary object to keep her hands busy. It was a paramount objet d’art and along with one’s eyes, a conveyor of attitude – and promise.
While the young married woman celebrating her 21st birthday at the opening of the play is happily married to the wealthy Lord Windermere, the new parents of a baby boy, she has artfully admitted to her sitting room, Lord Darlington, a man who has flirted with her outrageously the evening before.  Marla McLean’s Mrs. Windermere is almost girlish, a naive puritanical child-woman who exalts in her marriage but isn’t without the thrill of enjoying the attentions of a man other than her husband, in a safe and contained atmosphere.  And here in designer Teresa Przbylski’s pretty drawing room, the curtains gentling blowing in the wind, Lady Windermere’s safe place is airy and bright and pristine.
The earnest Lord Darlington (Gray Powell) is sincere and smitten with Lady Windermere but his yearning for her is anything but safe. He even hints at married men who meet with women other than their wives, though stops short at telling her that it might be her husband who is one of them. Not so with The Duchess of Berwick who drops in for a visit and a little gossip concerning Lord Windermere who has been seen with a certain Mrs. Erlynne, a woman with a "past", in other words someone who is "absolutely inadmissible" into polite society.
The Duchess shocks Lady Windermere with her dislosure, but we enjoy her congenial barbs nonetheless, and Corinne Koslo does them with relish, even if they do plant seeds of distrust in Lady Windermere’s mind. Her immediate dislike of the infamous Mrs. Erlynne will cause her to confront her husband who denies any assignations with Mrs. Erlynne. He begs her to have sympathy for the woman’s ill- fortunes and to receive her at the birthday ball tonight. But Lady Windermere is ‘a good woman,’ and like all good women of social standing, she holds her values to be sacred, creating so great a distance between herself and her husband, that it strains their marriage to the breaking point.
Despite the varied portraits of the well heeled men who hold the balance of power in this embroidered world of high society, it’s the women who are not only more interesting but eventually make the wheels turn in Lady Windermere’s Fan, a fan that will move from the glittering ball in Lady Windermere’s home in honor of her 21st birthday, to the apartments of Lord Darlington where Lady Windermere has impulsively gone to run away with him, and once again to the Windermere home where Lady Windermere has returned after being found in Lord Darlington’s rooms by Mrs. Erlynne who helps her to avoid a costly mistake that could have cost her husband and child. Mrs. Erlynne has amore vested interest in Lady Windermere’s welfare than she realizes.
Lady Windermere may be of high moral principles, but even Lord Darlington knows that society is a strict arbiter of behavior whether it is well intentioned or not. "If you pretend to be good, the world will take you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism." It is Wilde’s critique of society coupled with his own inimitable wit.
Martin Happer’s Lord Windermere is pitch perfect and sincere; Gray Powell’s Darlington is sexy, and then surprisingly, poetically genuine when describing the goodness of Lady Windermere; and the men of the Gentleman’s Club include some effective mini portraits which demonstrate Wilde’s wit and eye for character detail, especially the hapless Lord Luton (Jim Mezon) who is addicted to Mrs. Erlynne -  and knows he is a fool,  and Kyle Blair’s facile Cecil Graham, the soul of Wilde with bon mots like  "Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality."
One can’t help but be more fascinated with the badness of Mrs. Erlynne than the goodness of Lady Windermere. Tara Rosling plays her with just the right amount of being on the wrong side of the tracks, while flaunting Mrs. Erlynne’s beauty and ambition coupled with an in-your-face honesty that tends to deflate her enemies. Her sincere desire to help Lady Windermere out of her indiscretion is far more admirable, and ultimately touching, than the ‘honesty’ of the high born ladies who come to tea. With flaming red hair and dressed in one of the gorgeous and seductive evening gowns designed by William Schmuck, she stands in dramatic contrast to the virginal white of Lady Windermere.
But it is Peter Hinton’s direction which elevates Lady Windermere’s Fan to a great work of art – and great entertainment.  Influences of painters of the period like Mary Cassatt, Aubrey Beardsley, John Singer Sargent, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, visually inform the content of the scenes, while Hinton uses a series of arresting framed cut-outs focusing on the actors  for a brief second or two, making it appear as if we are standing back and viewing a painting or seeing the characters for the first time through a camera lens.
Add to that the intriguing  musical score put together by Sound Designer Richard Feren with a number of selections from  Strauss and Vivaldi along with the modern sounds of Rufus Wainwright, Katy Perry, and The Velvet Underground to complement the scenes, and you have a score that is surprisingly in perfect harmony with the play. In a theatre season well stocked with drama, music and comedy, Lady Windermere’s Fan is a highlight. It Plays until October 19 at the Festival Theatre.
Reviewed by Jeniva Berger  www.scenechanges.com