A Woman of No Importance review: Only the tourists will lap it up

Do we really need a year-long season of Oscar Wilde in the West End, of this play followed by Lady Windermere’s Fan, An Ideal Husband and finishing up with the inevitable Earnest?

I’m not at all sure that we do, but Dominic Dromgoole, livewire former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, thinks otherwise. His new company Classic Spring is presenting the season, he is directing this first production and, whatever other issues there might be, at least this play offers a refreshingly ringing endorsement of mould-breaking female behaviour.

But, heavens, it takes a long time to get there. For the first 45 minutes, we’re in and around the elegant country house of good-natured Lady Hunstanton (Anne Reid, much loved for her television work in Last Tango in Halifax), where nothing happens except that lots of people – who are they all? - in lovely frocks fling aphorisms and witticisms at each other, archly. They’re not so much characters as one-liners on two legs and the whole thing reminded me exactly why I increasingly find Wilde so weary-making. The action gets slower and slower and flatter and flatter, until it seems that it might just grind to a complete halt – and then Mrs Arbuthnot (Eve Best) makes her entrance and the situation at last starts to get a bit more interesting.

Mrs A, unmarried mother and self-defining disgrace to polite society, is given a refreshing and assured line in quiet but steely truth-telling by the impeccable Best, who is always a pleasure to watch. Mrs Arbuthnot is particularly vexed by the interest the caddish Lord Illingworth (Dominic Rowan) is showing in her wet-behind-the-ears 21-year-old son Gerald (Harry Lister Smith). Reid is certainly very game, but her three comically gloomy (sample title: Father’s a Drunkard and Mother is Dead) between-acts songs are hard work. As Wilde himself might have put it, one would have delighted us abundantly, three is over-generous.

American tourists will lap this up, but as for everybody else, I have my doubts.

Until Dec 30, Vaudeville Theatre (0330 333 4814, classicspring.co.uk)