Lyn Gardner Talks to Director Nicholai La Barrie as An Ideal Husband Comes to the Lyric Hammersmith
Published on 6 May 2026
When I ask director Nicholai La Barrie, associate director of the Lyric Hammersmith, if rehearsals for his contemporary, modern-dress revival of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband have been fun, he says that when “these crazy people ask me to make a play and let me loose in a rehearsal room, my attitude is to laugh my way to the first night and see what happens.” So, yes, definitely, he and his cast are having fun with Oscar Wilde’s high Victorian classic, often presented in high Victorian style. But not here. La Barrie’s production is stylishly up to date and on the nose. You can’t help feeling that Wilde himself would have thought it fun.
Not that La Barrie, whose revival lands at the Lyric exactly 100 years since it was last seen at the Hammersmith theatre, is failing to take Wilde’s play seriously.
“It’s such an interesting piece, a morality play about a politician who has done something incredibly dubious in the past and who must seek forgiveness in the present.” Wilde’s play may have premiered in 1895, but in the intervening 130 years there has seldom been a time when it hasn’t hit a nerve in its depiction of the political elite.
You only have to look to some recent political scandals in the UK or to watch Trump lying through his teeth to wonder, as Barrie does, "Whether we have got to a stage where politicians lie with impunity and just keep doubling down and where that sits with us as citizens and our individual morality?" Can we and should we forgive them?" La Barrie reckons that those in positions of leadership must expect to be held to higher moral standards.
The situation in An Ideal Husband is this. Cabinet minister Sir Robert Chiltern is a successful career politician and one who is held in high esteem for his integrity and honesty. His wife is amongst those who idealise him. But he is not being honest because the fortune which launched his political career was made dishonestly, and a new arrival in town, the deliciously villainous Mrs Cheveley, is about to expose him. “Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is.”
Wilde sets up a fascinating moral quandary, one which—like Florian Zeller’s upcoming The Truth at the Menier-- raises all sorts of questions about how much truth a marriage can bear and whether there are limits to forgiveness. Maybe it is not the morally upstanding but rather those who are imperfect who are most in need of love. Compassion too. The play comes with an extra layer of poignancy because Wilde was himself arrested for gross indecency because of his sexual relationships with men during its run and was subsequently imprisoned. He himself wryly admitted that the play’s “passages seem prophetic of the tragedies to come".
La Barrie thinks that Wilde, who was far from an ideal husband, wrote the play “as a kind of apology to his wife because he was a gay man who could not be the man his wife wanted him to be". La Barrie quotes Sir Robert, who tells his wife: "Why can’t you women love us, faults and all? Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals?” Such was Wilde’s absolute disgrace that his name was erased from the posters during An Ideal Husband’s original run at the Haymarket. Five years later he would be dead.
But that was then, and this is now, and for La Barrie, who comes from Trinidad—"I come from a tiny estate in Port O’ Spain"—one of the reasons for doing the play is not just because of what it tells us about Victorian hypocrisy, which persists into the present day, but because working with a cast of colour is a way to lay claim to one of the great classic plays of the English-speaking world.
He reckons that it is time for those who have been colonised “to claim the entire pantheon of English classics for ourselves” and to produce them in new ways that offer fresh insights.
“I was raised in Trinidad and had an education in a deeply Victorian English style. We were told we must learn the Queen’s English, and we did, an experience that was the same for millions of us. So now it’s the children of the colonised getting to use the language of the coloniser.” Something he says that he would never have dreamed of being able to do when he was growing up.
“I love stories and telling them on stage, and what these plays which are part of the canon have are great stories and big themes. They ask the big questions of us: how do we live together? How can we work better together? Who are we, and what do we feel about each other? The important questions, the ones that really matter. So yes, I want a chance to tell all these stories and lay claim to them and retell them. Getting the chance here to do that with a cast who are very funny, very sharp and very, very smart and who make being in the room feel very good. So yes, it’s lots of fun.”
An Ideal Husband plays at the Lyric Hammersmith from 7 May to 6 June 2026.
By Lyn Gardner
Lyn Gardner is an acclaimed theatre journalist and former critic with decades of experience covering British theatre, from off-West End and fringe theatre to major West End productions.