Her performance as Lady Bracknell is the hit of the season. But has Dame Maggie's merciless upstaging of the rest of the cast turned a comedy into a farce? Neil Norman reports
Dame Maggie Smith is, rightly, considered a very great actress. She has a quality which can mesmerise audiences; this is a very bankable quality and Robert Fox was quick to take advantage of it. When he heard that Dame Maggie had a fancy that she would like to play Lady Bracknell, he found a director, Nicholas Hytner, a theatre, the Aldwych, and a supporting cast for her. The Importance of Being Earnest opened at the beginning of March and has been a terrific hit.
However, Dame Maggie's star quality has not been without attendant problems. If you steal the show, the show starts to collapse. This is what has been happening at the Aldwych. What began as a highly praised production is looking chaotic as it nears the end of its run - and the theatrical cognoscenti are even revisiting the production to witness the comedy behind the comedy.
Although not a big role, Wilde's monstrous creation, Algy Moncrieff's Aunt Agatha, Lady Bracknell, has what you might call possibilities.
For an actress of Smith's vintage and experience, it provides the perfect showcase in which to display her jewelled comic timing, despite the potentially damaging baggage of the memory of another great Dame in the part, Edith Evans, immortalised on film with Michaels Redgrave and Denison.
But it is Dame Maggie's timing that has become a matter of subdued resentment among the rest of the cast. There have been private complaints that Dame Maggie has allowed her adoring audience to become unruly in its appreciation of her. The plot is increasingly interrupted by applause for Lady Bracknell's drawn-out aphorisms and sarcastic gestures.
Dame Maggie has intimated that she is not a great fan of this production. She is reported as saying that far from taking it to Broadway, she wouldn't even take it as far as Woking.
She particularly dislikes the distinctive set, with its exaggerated perpective; she finds it affected and distracting. And although he has been gentlemanly in public about the actress, it is believed that director Nicholas Hytner has not had an easy time with his leading lady. She has not been warmly co-operative towards Hytner's style of directing, with its strong visual sense and emphasis on the ensemble.
Several members of the production have agreed, when asked, that the atmosphere is tense. But no one would talk on the record about it.
The repressed conflicts in the dressing rooms have now exploded on to the stage. Dame Maggie's conspiracy with the audience against what she considers a doomed production makes the show a must.
Richard E Grant, who began the run with some gaiety, now looks extremely nervous as Algy. The two girls, Susannah Harker's Gwendoline and Claire Skinner's Cicely, also look twitchy. Only Alex Jennings's Jack Worthing seems to be maintaining his sang-froid. The reason for the cast's trepidation is clear the moment Maggie Smith steps on to the stage.
The audience erupts into applause at the mere sight of her; she pauses, discreetly ackowledging the adulation, before launching into a performance of comic grotesquerie that is not so much Wilde as wild. For a moment, one is whisked from the seats of the Aldwych to the studio audience of I Love Lucy. This is ironic, given that she went on record as stating that, as a redhead, she wished to avoid being seen as "a kind of British Lucille Ball".
Every classic line, every gesture, is stretched to infinity for laughs. If an eccentric gesture doesn't get a laugh, she repeats it until it does. If a movement gets a laugh straight away, she repeats it for another one. The eruption that followed "the line is immaterial" held up the action for several minutes.
Approaching one of Lady Bracknell's infamous witticisms, she pauses for what seems like hours before delivering the coup de grace: "To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both .... looks like carelessness." Had I wished, I would have had time in the pause to get up, go to the foyer, smoke a cigarette and return to my seat. And I would still have laughed.
The audience loves it. In the interval, the talk revolves around Smith's performance. "She's like some extraordinary bird," says one teenage girl, searching for an easy metaphor to describe the indescribably. A girl in a simple black dress ventures to suggest to her guffawing companions: "She's over the top."
It may be a little irksome for Dame Maggie that her only competition is the set which she so dislikes. When she is not speaking, the whipped-up audience directs its attention the the scenerey, emitting little gasps and laughter. Dame Maggie rolls her eyes, and the audience goes mad with applause.
This is grand stuff; grande dame stuff. But is it seemly? One critic has said privately that he regarded it as the most vulgar display of upstaging he had ever seen, recalling Michael Caine's remark that her ability to upstage other actors was "more like grand larceny". Certainly, it is a performance for which the term "selfless" does not immediately spring to mind.
And yet Smith's Lady Bracknell does indeed retain some bird-like qualities, in that she has detached herself from the rest of the cast and is currently flying around the periphery. She has evolved from a bird of prey to a vulture, contemplating the carcass of a production that has suffocated under the weight of her own performance.
Of course we laughed. Outrageous behaviour is always amusing. As long as you're not associated with it.