Review: An Ideal Husband – Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, London

None of us has forever, so let’s cut to the chase: if you’re not wild about Wilde, this latest version of An Ideal Husband from Nicholai La Barrie — even with an entirely capable Black cast that has read the assignment and gets high scores all round — is unlikely to be your cuppa. That said, it has many cute and cutting things to say and does so in a stylish way.

So writes Franco Milazzo for theQR.co.uk…

Sir Robert Chiltern is a highly successful, morally spotless politician, albeit one with a dark secret. As a young man, he gave state secrets to someone who profited hugely from them; in return, he was set up for life with connections and cash beyond his dreams. And now he meets Mrs Cheveley, who arrives with documentary evidence of his crime.

His wife knows nothing, and he’d like it to stay that way; therefore, the careful Chiltern turns to his hedonistic friend Lord Goring, a man who literally could not care less. Between them, a farce evolves as the pair attempt to save Robert’s career, marriage and reputation.

None of us has forever, so let’s cut to the chase: if you’re not wild about Wilde, this latest version of An Ideal Husband from Nicholai La Barrie — even with an entirely capable Black cast that has read the assignment and gets high scores all round — is unlikely to be your cuppa.

Oscar Wilde wrote An Ideal Husband in 1894 while the wolves were already gathering. Within months of its January 1895 premiere at the Haymarket, he would be convicted, jailed, and professionally destroyed for the kinds of private sins Chiltern spends four acts desperately trying to conceal from his more righteous spouse. The play, in other words, knew exactly what it was about.

Nicholai La Barrie’s Modern Vision at the Lyric Hammersmith

Nicholai La Barrie’s contemporary production at the Lyric Hammersmith (the first time the theatre has staged it in a century) arrives at a moment when the gap between public rectitude and private conduct feels equally charged. His ex-Lordship Peter Mandelson and the disgraced Prince Andrew have both discovered that the establishment’s tolerance for a compromised past has its limits and its costs.

La Barrie’s vision is clear enough: a pumping urban soundtrack (Corinne Bailey Rae, Soul II Soul and a spoken contribution from Richard Nelson), sly contemporary patois, a design by the formidable Rajha Shakiry that pivots fluently between a party scene with real voltage, the ordered calm of the Chiltern drawing room, and the studied minimalism of Goring’s bachelor pad. Zeynep Kepekli’s lighting and Holly Khan’s sound do careful, dividend-paying work in the play’s key confrontations.

**Jamael Westman and Aurora Perrineau** – **Image by Helen Murray**

The trouble is in the join between the old and the new. References to Hello! magazine and the AI service Claude, alongside the modern dress, sit uneasily alongside Wilde’s unaltered Victorian syntax; the complete absence of mobile phones in a production otherwise set firmly in the present creates a nagging friction rather than a productive anachronism. The contemporary setting makes a directorial argument but it doesn’t always remember to follow it through.

Standout Cast Performances in An Ideal Husband

Jamael Westman plays Lord Goring as the most knowing and contradictory man in any room he occupies. An unsubtle vehicle for Wildean philosophy who gets away with it through sheer charisma, Westman makes the most of the play’s relentless gift of epigrams, though his voice occasionally retreats into an unprojected mumble that loses the back rows. Opposite him, Aurora Perrineau brings considerable sass and sauce to Mrs Cheveley, the production’s most enjoyably double-edged figure: clever, devious, and complicated by a history with Goring that gives her blackmail scheme a tang of the personal.

It is, however, the supporting cast who stay with you. Emmanuel Akwafo is outstanding across his two roles: as Phipps, the Chilterns’ butler, he deploys a sardonic precision that makes every response to every request a miniature comedy of subordination; as Mason, Goring’s valet, he brings a sweetly campy relish to the part that gets some of the evening’s best laughs. Tiwa Lade’s Mabel Chiltern throws subtlety out of the window and halfway down King Street, which is exactly what the role demands and exactly what she delivers. Tamara Lawrance has the harder task as the uncomfortably earnest Lady Chiltern and navigates the character’s moral rigidity with enough intelligence to keep her sympathetic.

It is, however, the supporting cast who stay with you. Emmanuel Akwafo is outstanding across his two roles: as Phipps, the Chilterns’ butler, he deploys a sardonic precision that makes every response to every request a miniature comedy of subordination; as Mason, Goring’s valet, he brings a sweetly campy relish to the part that gets some of the evening’s best laughs.

More recent work in this territory — Peter Morgan’s Patriots, for instance, which covered the mechanics of power, compromise, and betrayal with rather more punch and panache — shows how high the bar currently sits for political drama with classical bones. This production doesn’t quite clear it. But the comparison is, perhaps, slightly unfair to what La Barrie is actually attempting: not a surgical dissection of power but a good-humoured, stylish entertainment that trusts its audience to draw their own lines between Wilde’s world and ours.

That trust is, in the end, well placed. This is not the sharpest or most daring reading of arguably Wilde’s most personal play. But it is, above all else, a hell of a lot of fun. Something which, in the spring of 2026, as both our government and the world order teeter on the edge of something or other, is a more than decent thing to be.

Featured Image: An Ideal Husband – Tiwa Lade and Jamael Westman – Image by Helen Murray