The Importance Of Being Earnest at Noël Coward Theatre

Last Updated on October 1, 2025

Stephen Fry commands the stage in Oscar Wilde’s classic.

When Stephen Fry enters the drawing room for the first time, dressed spectacularly as Lady Bracknell, the audience bursts into applause. Fry’s charisma and physical presence command the stage instantly, and almost every line he utters summons a laugh. This production of The Importance Of Being Earnest, transferred to the West End from the National Theatre, feels like a show created around him. He lives up to the task.

What is – literally – built around him is gorgeous. Rae Smith’s set changes from a beautiful drawing room to a flamboyant garden to a dramatic reception room, marble statues and all. The costumes, too, also designed by Smith, are increasingly fabulous, none more so than Lady Bracknell’s billowing skirts and sparkling jewellery. Jack and Algernon look, in every outfit, like they are straight off the red carpet at the Met Gala. The effort does not let up even at the curtain call, when each character emerges in a dazzling flower costume, bobbing up and down to the music.

In Oscar Wilde’s day, The Importance Of Being Earnest – a play about young, upper class men living double lives – shrouded its references to homosexuality in innuendo. Today, the play no longer deals with taboos, and its high camp potential is unleashed triumphantly by Max Webster’s interpretation.

Jack, played by Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (Angels in America, The History Boys), is a reputable landowner in Hertfordshire whose false identity as Earnest allows him to “have fun” in the city. Algernon, played by Olly Alexander – performer of Britain’s 2024 Eurovision entry – is a man of high society in London and is equally dependent on a fictional man (Mr Bunbury) to remove himself to “go Bunburying” in the countryside. As they enter into shallow but melodramatic love affairs with young women, their stories begin to unravel. Lady Bracknell, played by Fry, is the axis around which the plot revolves – inspiring conflict and resolving the play’s central mystery involving a handbag.

The rest of the cast excels alongside Fry. In non-Fry scenes, the show is stolen by Hayley Carmichael (The Birds, Theatre of Blood), who plays both Lane and Merriman, Algernon’s and Jack’s butlers respectively. Carmichael gets the biggest laughs of the show with her exaggerated movements and over-the-top bemusement. For all the clever one-liners in Wilde’s quip-filled script, it is slapstick comedy that lands the most consistently. Kitty Hawthorne (Kerry Jackson) and Jessica Whitehurst (Cyrano, The Comedy of Errors), as Gwendolyn and Cecily, are hilariously melodramatic, and the overt sexual chemistry between them is a surprising and successful addition to the production. Whitehurst, in particular, adds welcome audience interaction and improvisation. She is clearly relaxed and enjoying herself immensely – a feeling that transfers to the audience.

Stewart-Jarrett as Jack and Alexander as Algernon provide entertainment throughout, although scenes featuring just the two young men lack the riotous comedy conjured when Fry, or Carmichael, or Hawthorne and Whitehurst, appear. Hugh Dennis (Outnumbered, Fleabag) and Shobna Gulati (A Tupperware of Ashes, Through it Altogether) are charming as Reverend Canon Chasuble and Miss Prism.

The complete campness of the production is a far cry from how the original might have been staged, and the result is a terrifically entertaining show. However, beyond an added lesbian flirtation, a few modern pop songs and one or two 21st century references, the production adds little to surprise viewers familiar with modern interpretations of Wilde’s classic. The fleeting – but hugely successful – moments when actors slip out of their posh accents and show that they are, in fact, not actually from 1895, prove that the show could have leaned further towards the modern day. While the characters are contemporary in their free displays of sexuality, much of the play’s social critique feels restricted to its 19th century context.

It feels like a missed opportunity. When Sarah Snook played all the characters in Kip Williams’s adaptation of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in the West End in 2024, the drama was cleverly moulded into a critique of the image-obsessed age of social media. Not so for The Importance Of Being Earnest; the almost entirely unchanged script creates a funny, but largely safe, production.

However, for what it’s worth, The Importance Of Being Earnest is a raucous night at the theatre.

The Importance of Being Earnest at Noël Coward Theatre runs from 30th September 2025 until 10 January 2026.

Noël Coward Theatre

85-88 St Martin’s Lane,
London, 
WC2N 4AP