Wilde's Fan is a sharp satire

A silk sofa, the silent butler carrying messages and elegant ladies dripping with jewels and hypocrisy are the stuff of Lady Windermere’s Fan now playing at Walterdale theatre.

British playwright Oscar Wilde’s two-hour-plus production is a dramatic comedy loaded with witty epigrams that take a bite out of society’s morals.

As a representation of the era’s high society, Geri Dittrich’s costumes and Leland Stelck’s set are visually beautiful.

And master painter Joan Heys Hawkins’ stylized Greek columns and pillars in particular are indicative of a society where sophistication means more than sincerity.

This is a world where all passions are indulged and the only real crime is getting caught. For men, it’s a way to pass the time. For women it means complete ostracism.

This pure Victorian melodrama is set on the 21st birthday of the virtuous Lady Windermere. She is about to come of age and the world appears rosy until the scandal-mongering Duchess of Berwick poisons the day with gossip.

She lets on that in the last six months Lord Windermere spent an unreasonable amount of time and money on the mysterious Mrs. Erlynne. Suspicious of her husband’s relationship, Lady Windermere is tempted into having an affair with Lord Darlington to inflict her revenge.

Patrick Maloney captures the protectiveness and stoic priggishness of Lord Windermere while Dan Fessenden hints at the smarmy, seductive nature of Lord Darlington, who morosely delivers one of the play’s most famous lines, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Leslie Caffaro is inspired as the Duchess of Berwick, an old biddy dressed in fine satins with a gossipy tongue that destroys lives as part of her daily regimen, while David Owen is the play’s comedic centre as the clueless Lord Augustus Lorton.

Brayden O’Boyle cuts a splendid figure as the superficial Mr. Cecil Graham – a perfect Wilde stand-in, cigarette and all) – and Marsha Amanova dominates as the enigmatic Mrs. Erlynne from the moment she makes her first entrance.

She is the scarlet woman, an outcast from high society, whose selfless sacrifice for the title character allows Amanova to command the stage. Her unaffected performance from villain to martyr to victorious heroine puts the audience squarely on Mrs. Erlynne’s side.

And last but not least, Miranda Broumas delivers a well-bred if somewhat dramatic performance of Lady Windermere, whose moral dilemma drives the play. She has an innocent, petulant quality and appears out-of-sync in this somewhat dissolute world – or maybe that was Wilde’s intention.

Wilde has dreamed up and director Martin Stout assembled a tony element of patrician eccentrics that, by and large, deliver a crisp presentation and remind us to treat everyone as they deserve.

Lady Windermere’s Fan runs until Saturday, Dec. 17.