"A Woman of No Importance" is in my judgment the least excellent of his four comedies; it might be called his "unpleasant" play: it is two acts of sheer talk, in Wilde's usual vein, and two acts of acting. The plot is, as usual, insignificant. A certain lazy villain in high official position meets a young fellow and offers him a post as his secretary. The boy, much pleased, introduces his mother, and the villain discovers that the boy is his own son. The son insists that the father should marry his mother, but she declines. The father offers to make what amends he can, loses his temper, and refers to the lady as a woman of no importance; for which he gets his face well smacked. The son marries a rich American Puritan. This enables Wilde to be very witty at the expense of American fathers, mothers, and daughters. Tree played the villain very well, it is said.
Never having seen Wilde's next play acted, I once innocently framed this statement for the domestic circle: "I have never seen 'An Ideal Husband'"; and when my wife sententiously replied that she had never seen one either, I became careful to be more explicit in future statements. No less clever than the others, it has plot and action, and is interesting to the end. Of all his plays it is the most dramatic. On its first production it was provided with a splendid cast, including Lewis Waller, Charles Hawtrey, Julia Neilson, Maude Millett, and Fanny Brough. In the earlier plays all the characters talked Oscar Wilde; in this Wilde took the trouble, for it must have been to him a trouble, to conceal himself and let his people speak for themselves: they stay in their own characters in what they do as well as in what they say. "An Ideal Husband" was produced at the Haymarket early in 1895, and a few weeks later, at the St. James's, "The Importance of Being Earnest."
Wilde called this a trivial comedy for serious people. It is clever beyond criticism; but, as one critic says, one might as well sit down and gravely discuss the true inwardness of a soufflé. In it Wilde fairly lets himself loose; such talk there never was before; it fairly bristles with epigram; the plot is a farce; it is a mental and verbal extravaganza. Wilde was at his best, scintillating as he had never done before, and doing it for the last time. He is reported to have said that the first act is ingenious, the second beautiful, and the third abominably clever. Ingenious it is, but its beauty and cleverness are beyond praise. To have seen the lovely Miss Millard as Cecily, the country girl, to have heard her tell Gwendolen, the London society queen (Irene Vanbrugh), that "flowers are as common in the country as people are in London," is a delight never to be forgotten.