GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
The Importance of Being Earnest
Tara Theatre, London
PLAYING all nine characters in Oscar Wilde’s best-loved comic drama, Kudzanayi Chiwawa and Ayesha Casely-Hayford take such liberties with its content and structure that one might expect the whole venture to fall apart in a tangled heap.
Yet the play is so lovingly bashed about that it comes through the ordeal with flying colours, as do the pair themselves.
Operating within a minimalist set and dressed only in white T-shirts and black trousers, Chiwawa and Casely-Hayford offer up a deliberately unruly interpretation of Wilde’s farcical goings-on and, in blurring time, space and boundaries, add an extra dimension to the humour already on offer.
MARY CONWAY becomes impatient with the intellectual self-indulgence of Tom Stoppard in a production that is, nevertheless, total class
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
This is a concert of ambition and courage by organist and improviser Wayne Marshall, says SIMON DUFF
MARY CONWAY applauds the revival of a tense, and extremely funny, study of men, money and playing cards



