Oscar Wilde pretended that life was much too serious to be taken seriously but in A Woman Of No Importance, he takes it very seriously indeed. The play hits hard at Victorian sexist hypocrisy, thumps aristocratic inertia by contrast to American vim and attacks the patronising earnestness of the idle rich.

Although changing social mores make some of Wilde’s exaggerated observations less pertinent, dozens remain to be relished and remembered; the celebrated epigrams scatter like stars who travel timelessly through space, their brightness obscuring their origin.

The play is an uneasy mix of sentiment and melodrama. That it succeeds today, when single mothers are not shamed and when America is an equal partner, is entirely due to the Brighton Little Theatre cast. They throw their hearts and souls into making Oscar’s wit and woe believable.

Alistair Birch is brilliantly cynical and heartless as Wilde’s alter-ego Lord Illingworth. The “puritan or profligate” society of Sue Wicks, Caroline Lambe, Patti Griffiths, Ruth Bailey and Bryony Cook, and the variously inadequate chaps of Tobias Clay, Des Potton and Martyn Coates are also excellent.

But the palms go to Tess Gill and Joseph Bentley, grimly demonstrating a suffocating love that declared its name all too often.