Lady Windermere's Fan

When Lady Windermere’s Fan premiered on stage at the St James’s Theatre in London on February 20, 1892, the newspapers proclaimed that ‘Mr. Oscar Wilde is nothing unless brilliant and witty.”

The tangled complexities of the story about a wife who suspects her husband of having an affair with surprising consequences (we won’t spoil the surprise!) are rivaled only by Wilde’s sparkling and witty dialogue. But despite its diamond-sharp one-liners, there is more to Lady Windermere’s Fan than mere entertainment; it is above all a subtle social satire that deftly balances comedy and seriousness, particularly pointed about the hypocrisy of Victorian attitudes to women and sex.

Join us at the historic Crane Estate for this very special opportunity as award-winning Rory Pelsue directs Theater in the Open’s performance of Lady Windermere’s Fan, and see why one of its dashing characters, Lord Darlington, famously proclaims, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”