Fans enjoy Dot Productions latest show
Posted on 17th July 2026
It’s been a while Dot Productions brought a play to the Corn Hall, having previously favoured outdoor productions at the Oaksmere Pub. The company’s USP is offering classic plays acted out unfashionably straight. Instead of vamping them up or busting down the fourth wall Dot refuses to indulge in any of that nonsense. Instead, with commendable faith in the text, in the audience, and in themselves for that matter, Lady Windermere’s Fan was presented as the author intended.
Admittedly, with a cast of only five actors, the mission statement does get a little bent out of shape, most notably when co-founder Andrew Lindfield stood in for Agatha Carlisle, complete with “her” own fan, somewhat ineffectually covering “his” face. For the most part, however, character changes were handled brilliantly. When Sarita Plowman morphed from the garrulous Duchess of Berwick into the mysterious Mrs Erlynne she did so with a costume change but also with a nuanced change of character. Erlynne is the most rounded character in the play, but this made it all the more impressive that she found such emotional depth when surrounded by more broadly drawn characters.
Holly Baynes tried her best to inject life into Lady Windermere, but burdened with an infuriatingly obtuse reaction to her husband’s supposed affair, we have to accept that no one in a Wilde play just sits down and talks things through. David Sayers has a bit more fun with the part of her husband, though he too is required to deftly avoid an obvious course of action in order to keep the plot going. Freed from such responsibilities, it’s Dom Thomson that looks like he’s having the best of times, as the foppish Lord Darlington attempts to woo Lady Windermere.
As with much of Wilde’s writing, the play is all about class, society, disgrace and social isolation. Modern audiences will, I think, be surprised how the plot resolves. How much of this is due to the social conventions of the day is hard to know, but there’s little doubt that Wilde was passing comment on a morally complex situation. And no prizes for working out why society’s condemnation over how lives are lived should so preoccupy him. What is fascinating is how far sympathy for his world view seeps into this production, and Sarita Plowman’s performance in particular. They may have played it straight, but did so with an acknowledgement from the outset where their sympathies lay.