It’s good to find the Open Air Theatre, which famously specialises in Shakespeare and modern musicals, varying its summer fare; but, as Irina Brown’s production instantly proclaims, this isn’t your ordinary revival of Wilde. A tiny brass-and-woodwind band wanders the stage, which itself consists of a curved walkway leading to a large white mushroom-like table, behind which there’s an arc of steel shiny enough to reflect the faces of the gathered narcissists. And on come the cast, to stare at the audience through binoculars, telescopes, a monocle, a lorgnette. Is this (I asked myself) the way to open a play that Brown says in the programme is “fresh, immediate and urgent”?

Sadly, no was my answer. Immediate and urgent this revival isn’t. Mannered and artificial it is throughout: from Algy Moncrieff’s surreal London flat to John Worthing’s country mansion, which consists of scores of single pink roses, a tiny canal, a bridge, a doll’s house. You might argue that The Importance of Being Earnest is a comedy of manners, packed with characters who seem to know that their smarter quips will end up in every dictionary of quotations. But, sorry, I think more realistic and less self-consciously comic acting produces funnier results.

As it is, the performers have surely been encouraged to ditch the subtle and embrace the broad by a director who often draws more attention to her own inventiveness than to character. Maids, butlers, gardeners ponce, posture, do little dances. The famous quarrel between Gwendolen and Cecily — Jack’s fiancée and his ward — becomes a parody Japanese tea ceremony. And Jack’s way of saying that he’ll prevent Cecily from marrying Algy is to cram her into that doll’s house and bang down the roof. The performers’ inevitable reaction is to flaunt and exaggerate.

There are one or two decent performances, notably from Ryan Kiggell as the earnest Jack of the title and Jo Herbert as the robust object of his dogged attentions; but even they have their over-the-top moments, and Susan Wooldridge’s Lady Bracknell has made her home up there. She’s not just a bit of a battleaxe, which would be fine, but a swaggering, snarling mix of the fierce, the fey and the half-mad. She begins by wearing a hat that looks like a small wheatfield, and ends resembling a giant purple grape. And somehow that says it all.

Box office: 0844 8264242, to July 25

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