Walk up the red carpet into The Nightingale Club just off Birmingham’s Hurst Street, and into a world of A list stars, draped in dead animals and diamante, drowning their jaded sorrows in endless martinis, voguing for the paparazzi like it’s 1990 and hawking up their emotional innards for all to see.
Blinded by the camera flash and incensed at the barrage of impertinent questions yapped your way by endless tabloid hacks high on instant coffee, you’ll stumble into a world so achingly cool, so drenched in Chanel No. 5, that for a while you won’t notice the stench of rotting celebrity flesh.
This is Oscar Wilde’s A Women of No Importance, as seen through the eyes of Ay Mango! Theatre. A world where angels fear to tread, the bottom feeders of red top journalism find their juiciest pickings, and the photo editors employed to cover up It Girls’ modesty with sensitively placed yellow stars have a field day.
Directed by the inimitable Ellie Middleton, with an all female cast, and glamorous soundtrack courtesy of Burn The Bra Crew, Ay Mango! Theatre’s production drags this classic class satire slurring and bitching into the age of reality TV and rubber neck journalism.
When Wilde penned his biting slur on a world he viewed askance from its very heart, the wider public had little idea of the lives their so-called social betters lived, something which made his work all the more scandalous. Behind the glamour of the glitterati, things were just as sordid and messy then as they are in this unshockable day and age, as Ay Mango! Theatre makes deliciously clear.
Mistress Allonby (Claire Corfield) is an Essex girl extraordinaire, too rich and jaded for gold digging, too pissed to keep her bra straps or her tongue from slipping.
Lady Hunstanton (Miriam Edwards) is an aging Cyndie Lauper crossed with Dawn Porter- her blonde is so peroxide it looks like she’s about to disintegrate, and that Nu Yoik drawl is more self indulgent and drawn out than a painful death on a Broadway stage. “Hunny….bunny….treacle pie!” she slurs through lipstick thicker than a rhino’s skin, “I can believe anything, provided that it’s quite, quite fabulous!”
Lady Caroline (Rahil Liapopoulou), meanwhile, pours Greco Versace scorn on all about her, wearing a red dress so utterly expensive that mere mortals like ourselves would have to take out a mortgage to get our hands on it.
Lording it over everyone, unsurprisingly, is Lord Illingworth (Lorna Meehan), who prances around with his cock in the air, bearly held in by his Saville Row suit. He knows the worth of everything, and dollar signs light up his hard little eyes like lust in a young lover’s gaze, as he eyes up all the flesh for sale at tonight’s couture cattle market.
Wide eyed and innocent, Ilingworth’s shy young PA Gerald (Emily Spetch) drinks in all this dazzling refinement, desperate to be part of a world he feels he’s very much beneath, and all the while Hester (Lucy Nicholls), that “woman of no importance”, looks on aghast from behind her handbag, trying not to vomit. I didn’t know whether to side with her, Lord Illingworth, or with those rich girls who just wanna have fun- either way, I certaintly enjoyed seeing how the other half live Ay Mango! Theatre style.
