An Ideal Husband- Bristol Old Vic ✭✭✭✭

Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward are often spoken of in the same breath: wit, polish, social satire, a shared instinct for turning manners into theatre. But seeing Wilde after last year’s woeful Private Lives at the Bristol Old Vic only sharpens the difference between them. Coward, in that production at least, felt stranded inside his own period, his sophistication preserved rather than activated, like a drawing-room set left permanently under museum lighting. Wilde, by contrast, refuses containment. His work behaves less like period drama and more like a system still running in the background: reputation, performance, desire, and the quiet violence of being seen. Nicholai La Barrie’s production of An Ideal Husband for Lyric Hammersmith and Bristol Old Vic understands that Wilde is not something to be updated so much as something already porous enough to absorb the present. The plot is familiar enough: Sir Robert Chiltern, a politician built on an immaculate public reputation, is…