Stage review Wilde would be wild about this luscious, playful show

Oscar Wilde's final play premiered weeks before the court case that led to his imprisonment for homosexuality, and the subtext of homoerotic desire that runs through this comedy of manners from 1895 has been well mined already.

- Arifa Akbar

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 having 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.

Algernon's guiding principle of "Bunburyism" (a sensible alter ego who offsets his amoral hedonism), has never sounded more like a sexual double entendre.