Circa Theatre’s The Import­ance of Being Earn­est has marked itself down as a fant­ast­ic retell­ing of my favour­ite non-New Zea­l­and play, and an excel­lent night out besides.

Staged in a thrust stage in Circa One, Jonath­an Price’s dir­ect­ori­al hand is evid­ent as a play that is often so caught in (delight­ful) intern­al con­ver­sa­tions is broadened out and gif­ted to the audi­ence via plenty of asides, acro­bat­ics and know­ing winks.

You’ll likely know the story of this piece, but in the event that you don’t, here’s an out­lining. Algernon (Iso­bel Mackin­non) and Jack (Andrew Pater­son) are upper-class soci­ety mates. Jack has a house in the coun­try and divides his time between his city and coun­try res­id­ences, using a dif­fer­ent name in each. He is des­per­ately in love with Gwen­dol­en (Ryan Carter), and hopes to marry her. Algernon refers to Jack­’s escapades as “bun­bury­ing” and decides to do a spot of his own to seduce Jack­’s ward, Cecily (Dawn Cheong). Along the way there’s missed con­nec­tions, mys­ter­i­ous pasts, and a whole lot of caper­ing.

This is a glor­i­ous sta­ging of this story, for it man­ages to ride the line between wholly satir­ic­al and also giv­ing the char­ac­ters space to be bold and res­on­ant in their iden­tit­ies – some­thing that Wilde does well in his ori­gin­al script but is often mocked in sta­gings. This is espe­cially import­ant when two of the char­ac­ters are being played by per­formers in drag. Sure, the entire script takes place over a hand­ful of days, involves sev­er­al improb­able romances and shows off upper class folk without inter­rog­at­ing their cir­cum­stances, but in a play this nuanced, it’s fine to just sit in the non­sense for two won­der­ful hours.

It is a will­fully, won­der­fully camp show with bold music­al num­bers and equally as bold choices, re-ima­gin­ing a clas­sic­al play with many con­tem­por­ary twists. Inclu­sion of little games on stage amongst the wider sta­ging delight and catch the eye – I espe­cially enjoyed the act­ors tak­ing chiv­alry to the max when lead­ing around the ven­er­able Lady Brack­nell (Irene Wood) at the top of the show, along­side the sheer deli­ri­ous lust Miss Prism (Anne Cham­ber­lain) and Rev. Chas­uble (Peter Hamb­leton) seemed to have for each oth­er.

Cir­ca’s The Import­ance of Being Earn­est is an unap­pre­ci­ated gem and only on for a few more days. The acro­bat­ics, wild block­ing, heightened per­form­ance and sheer joy in the work is some­thing that should­n’t be missed.