THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST         Southwold & Aldeburgh, rep

THE SEASON BEGINS! Not doing formal mouse-rate reviews of these, but for local eyes and visitors it’s worth nipping through the ones I can get to – this one is around all week, before moving on to Southwold and I can report that director Charlotte Parry and cast do old Oscar proud. Respectfully, and Mark Sterling’s design is beautiful, economical and sleek as Wilde would want. The only eyebrow-raiser is, I suppose, the genderswitch of the manservants, Lane in the city and Merriman in the country: Megan Sharman plays both as a Sloaniely elegant, if slightly improbable, female senior servant in 1920s cocktail-trousers . Fair enough , Algernon might have been a trendsetter. And it’s the only improbability: everyone else is just-so.The young quartet are fun all the way, hugely active (the physical direction is splendid, mobile and free and funny: some productions are so overwhelmed byt he language they never remember how young these larky creatures are). Will Howard’s Algernon is…