The souffle rises about a quarter of the way before stodgily collapsing in Oliver Parker's new version of Oscar Wilde's classic. It gets the four principals out and about in a variety of semi-stylised Edwardian locations, adds a hectoring and anachronistically jazzy score underneath much of the dialogue and goes for some wacky stand-alone inventions, including Gwendolen (Frances O'Connor) getting the name Ernest tattooed on her... well, a tactfully framed close-up means that we can't be sure exactly where.

The reliably beautiful Rupert Everett plays Algy, and as in An Ideal Husband his extra-textual gay identity could be said to have lent an appropriate frisson to the idea of Bunburyism. As Jack, Colin Firth is happier with his familiar mode of sexily cold grumpiness than with outbursts of gaiety, and both O'Connor and Reese Witherspoon, playing Cecily, needed longer with the dialogue coach. Their lines and accents are laboured, something that none of the principals is entirely free from. Judi Dench is very subdued as Lady Bracknell (her "a handbag?" is hardly more than a whisper), and for her interrogation of Jack, she is enthroned in monolithic Mrs Brown-style splendour, quite wrong for the scene. But Edward Fox does well as the adenoidal manservant Lane. He alone supplied the deft and necessary touch of self-conscious theatrical artifice.