The Importance of Being Earnest (performance at Roundabout Theatre, New York, viewed on screen at St James Cavalier cinema) is not just one of the most entertaining comedies ever written, but also a very shrewd portrayal of upper class snootiness and matrimonial manoeuvring and counter-manoeuvring in high society.

Oscar Wilde took some of the essentials of plots in Victorian melodrama and sent them up with supreme skill, and in Lady Bracknell he created one of the most likeable monsters in the English theatre.

The comedy is not only essentially British but also born in the Britain of over 100 years ago. It is therefore not a work to be tackled lightly by non-British professionals. This production with a largely non-British cast is the great success it is, largely because it is directed by a fine and greatly experienced Briton, Brian Bedford.

His awareness of traditional style, and of course, in his astoundingly accomplished, and quite unforgettable, performance as Lady Bracknell, has produced what must surely be one of the most unmissable US productions of an English classic in recent times.

The Importance of being Earnest is an exquisitely mannered work in which the plot is woven of coincidences so absurd that the audience gasps for more, and dialogue coruscating with epigrammatic witticisms of the highest Wildean elegance makes the audience burst into laughter only restrained by the fear of losing the next laugh line.

Bedford presents all this in a series of sets that are equally artificial and nearly as attractive, and has also provided the front of stage with a design suggesting old-fashioned footlights.

Moreover, he reminds us even more strongly about the comedy’s artificiality by making his cast deliver their lines at a volume superior to that with which we are familiar in productions of realistic drama, without, however, spoiling, save very occasionally, the musicality of the lines. I must admit, however, that being part of a cinema audience and not in the New York theatre itself, it took me some time to get accustomed to this and accept it.

Effective timing of lines, and particularly of laugh lines, is of the essence in any comic production, and to this Bedford has given very close attention, making sure no laughs are lost, except on one occasion when an unusually long pause produced a fleeting puzzlement rather than a laugh.

The mastery of vocal as well as bodily control was certainly seen at its best in Bedford’s own performance. His Lady Bracknell is not a clever actor in drag, not a superior Charley’s Aunt, but a real woman, powerfully domineering, who has been having her own way in most things for decades.

Severe costumes and fearful headdresses remind us that this is a character from a generation far removed in mentality from the elegant frivolity of her daughter Gwendolen (Sara Topham) and of her nephew Algernon (Santino Fontana) and from the simple sweet dress of the teenage Cecily (Charlotte Parry).

Lady Bracknell is described as a gorgon and no doubt that is how she appears to the other characters in the play, but the magic of a great comedy transmutes her into a fascinating creature resolved to determine all the important things that happen to the people she knows.

Her probing into little and large mysteries, and her shocked reactions to the very strange things she is forced to learn, make her into the mainspring of the play, and therefore into the character we most long to see on the stage.

This is a very shrewd, quick-thinking character, and Bedford’s subtly changing facial expressions keep us involved in the way he is reacting to the plot’s surprising developments.

I find it difficult to say which moment in the performance struck me as most successful, but I greatly enjoyed Lady Bracknell’s mixture of puzzlement and indignation whenever the matter of Victoria Railway Station and the famous handbag came up. Bedford’s delivery of the famous, “A handbag!” is not pregnant with disgust like Edith Evans’s in the famous film version, but beautifully incredulous.

The direction of the various scenes in all three acts makes you see the emotions thinly hidden by the elegantly worded lines. There are moments, say in the first scene between Algernon and Jack, when Bedford allows his actors to forget their high-class breeding and so disturbs the comicality of anger barely suppressed by good manners, but by and large scenes develop and merge into the next ones with admirable smoothness.

Santino Fontana’s Algernon is a cool and utterly amoral Algernon, clearly delighting in his invention of Bunburying and in his success with the comically romantic Cecily with her constant updating of her adventures in her diary. Charlotte Parry looks at least 15 years older than the 18 she is meant to be, and relies on a clearly assumed ‘girlish’ voice to project her age and personality.

Topham’s Gwendolen, helped by her excellent outfits, is the greatly sophisticated young socialite, very sure of herself; she will clearly become a less conservative Lady Bracknell in the years to come. Her handling of Jack in the proposal scene is masterly.

Furr, serious-minded and determined to marry Gwendolen, even if it means being re-christened at the age of 29, makes a good contrast with the fun-loving Algernon. His throwing himself on Dana Ivey’s overacted Miss Prism when he mistakenly thinks she is his mother is excellent as it is utterly in character. Even this absurd character is better as a mother than no mother at all. I like Paxton Whitehead’s absurd but never overdone Canon Chasuble.

Watch an encore performance of the show at St James Cavalier, Valletta, on Saturday at 7.30 p.m.