Oscar Wilde said in answer to a friend who described The Importance of Being Earnest as a set of mosaics that it should be more like an explosion or pistol-shot. Well, Peter Gill’s revival won’t do in your head or blow you out of your seat into the Strand, and, really, why should it? It’s a decent, serviceable production that I’d recommend to anybody who doesn’t know the play too well, for there’s nothing odd or fancy about it: no German Lady Bracknell, as was the case in one of Jonathan Miller’s weirder revivals; no hint of the gay subtext that W.H. Auden saw when Algy Moncrieff recommends those wanting to pursue secret lives to invent a sickly friend called Bunberry who must be regularly visited; not even the restoration of the third act that sees Algy imprisoned for debt and is normally cut.

But the production does bring the long-absent Penelope Keith back to the West End in the role that her perfect diction, her effortlessly elegant accent, her shape, her demeanour, everything, suggests she was created by the theatrical gods to perform. She’s not quite the “gorgon” she’s angrily called by Harry Hadden-Paton’s Jack aka Ernest Worthing, whom she initially forbids to marry her daughter Gwendolen, but, again, why should she be? In her vast purple-feathered hat and billowing mauve-and-gold dress, she admittedly looks as if she could be fixed to the prow of the ship of the returning Medusa-murderer, Perseus; but she has her benign and even smiling moments and as someone so socially assured, so serenely confident in her status can and should.

And when Keith comes to the play’s most famous three syllables, “a handbag”, meaning the battered reticule in which the baby Jack was mistakenly put by the nanny Prism, it’s not the horrified expostulation that came gusting out of Edith Evans.

Rather, it’s the vocal equivalent of a frown, a blink and a raised eyebrow. That unapologetic snob, Keith’s Bracknell, right, reserves her indignation for the place where that handbag was left: the cloakroom at Victoria station, of all downmarket locations! Her hauteur is always there, but it’s unforced, taken for granted, habitual, as (again) it should be. The supporting actors are all fine - William Ellis an Algy with a slightly arrogant swagger, Daisy Haggard a lisping Gwendolen who is a bit of a sexual predator – and can hardly be blamed if their sentences sound as they’re in invisible quotation marks.

After all, half the play is to be found in any good dictionary of quotations. That is one of its delights but, if I’m to carp a little, also one of its irritants. So much is familiar. So much is a formulaic inversion of the cliches and truisms that, along with the deceptions and hypocrisies of conventional society, Wilde was elaborately mocking.

“The suspense is terrible, I hope it will last.” “Divorces are made in heaven”.

“Her hair has turned quite gold from grief”.

“My diary is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions and consequently meant for publication.”

“In married life three is company and two none.”

Let me have a go myself. On last night’s evidence, this production is not especially remarkable – and so is perfectly worth seeing.

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