Saunders is a delight in Lady Windemere’s Fan (Picture: Marc Brenner)

Jennifer Saunders is Absolutely Fabulous in this revival of Oscar Wilde’s earliest play. She’s returning to the stage for the first time in over 20 years in a show which channels Wilde’s feminist agenda with aplomb.

So ahead of its time, it’s astounding that this script is 120-something years old. In Lady Windemere’s Fan, Wilde rustles feathers with clever, tactful and gutsy representations of women, while the men are babbling buffoons. The woman are funnier, too, whereas in the play’s only markedly all-male scene it is all ego and ignorance; their wars of words pitiful.



That said – the men get some of the best lines. After professing his love to Lady Windemere and being rejected, Lord Darlington regales one of Wilde’s most vivid sentiments: ‘We’re all the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’

Joseph XX and Samantha Spiro as Mrs Erlynne (Picture: Marc Brenner)

Not much happens in Oscar Wilde’s 1892 societal comedy, but therein lies the point. We’re glued to one character, Mrs Erlynne, who is both a ‘clever’ and ‘good’ and (to some, at points) a wretched woman: she proves that appearances can deceive. ‘History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality,’ Wilde’s script says, and his play deals in gossip from the feminist viewpoint.


We’re at Lord and Lady Windemere’s end of season party when Lady Windemere suspects Mrs Erlynne to be sleeping with her husband. Lady Windemere is a coward whereas Mrs Erlynne commands the room, taking pleasure in putting the men down. The deconstruction of Mrs Erlynne informs the second act of Wilde’s play, about the emerging power of strong women of the time.

Samantha Spiro excellently captures Mrs Erlynne’s chameleonic nature and how she uses her shady social persona to get her own way.

On the other hand, Jennifer Saunders’ role as The Duchess Of Berwick is more cookie-cutter. Stringently worrying about other people’s business – although she has a kind heart – the Duchess Of Berwick spends the play informing others, and directing her mute daughter in the direction of rich men for courting.

Although her role as The Duchess Of Berwick could have more meat on it, Saunders is commanding and joyously sassy on stage. The Duchess is really comic filler, the play’s ultimate social snob, consumed by the values of her day, and her gossip-spreading.

Director Kathy Burke has even written a fourth-wall breaking song for Saunders, who bizarrely commands the audience in a sing-along during a scene change and has audiences repeating after her in a surreal comic ditty. Wilde would have adored it, though Saunders’ voice crackles. It is the point that she can’t hit the notes, but there is something odd about her hoarse voice: funny, but not a pleasant sound all the same.



Wilde said that the look of a play was more important than its content and Paul Wills’ set design glows with the opulence and splendour of the Victorian elite. Wilde must always be performed in period so the dresses and furnishings can match the highness of his satirical writing.

The #MeToo movement is in mid-swing and this classic play which rips into the warring upper classes and asks the audience to consider how appearances can be deceptive, feels newly, vividly fresh.

Lady Windemere’s Fan runs until 7 April at the Vaudeville Theatre.

MORE: Julius Caesar starring Ben Whishaw and David Morrissey involves the audience in gruesome murder scenes

MORE: The Birthday Party review: Harold Pinter’s disorientating thriller still haunts 60 years after it first opened