The Importance of Being Earnest review – Wilde with plate-smashing perversity

Gerald Barry’s opera based on Oscar Wilde’s comedy seems to be finding a regular place in the repertoire. Having opened at the Linbury in 2013, for this revival, Ramin Gray’s production moves to the Barbican – one of the work’s co-commissioners – offering audiences a full-scale staging. Once again, the immediate appeal of what might seem an unpromising source for operatic setting is amply confirmed.

If Barry combines a blend of respect and wilfulness, then he has most certainly made the classic text his own. Around two thirds of the play has gone, while there are a couple of additions – Barry’s bass Lady Bracknell (here given indomitable vocal and physical presence by Alan Ewing) and contralto Hilary Summers’ grand yet paradoxically vulnerable Miss Prism both launch into highly idiosyncratic versions of Schiller’s Ode to Joy, sung in German.

Much of Barry’s setting of a text stuffed with quotations, meanwhile, is mis-accented in a way that would see him thrown off the composition course at any self-respecting conservatoire.

Yet within these and similar perversities lies much of the humour of the piece, whose studied artificiality is equally underlined by Christina Cunningham’s contemporary costumes, the on stage presence of the doughty Britten Sinfonia under conductor Tim Murray, and such bruitist audio-visual interventions as the stomping jackboots or the now notorious frenzy of plate-smashing that accompanies the hostile pleasantries indulged in by Stephanie Marshall’s phlegmatic Gwendolen and Claudia Boyle’s stratospheric Cecily.

Meanwhile the two male leads – Benedict Nelson’s Algernon and Paul Curievici’s Jack – give full value, Irish dancing and all, managing to keep a straight face no matter how absurd the positions they find themselves in.

• At Barbican, London, to 3 April. Box office: 020-7638 8891.