TELEVISION history was made last year when David Suchet stepped down from the role of Hercule Poirot.

He had achieved his ambition of putting the entire Poirot canon on TV over a 25-year period. 

Now he has joined forces with West End producer Kim Poster again for a new production of Oscar Wilde’s enduring high comedy The Importance of Being Earnest at The Mayflower Theatre. 

And in a huge departure for the well respected character actor, he will be playing a woman.

So what had persuaded him to step into the shoes – and frock, of the redoubtable Lady Bracknell, the epitome of the late Victorian grande dame and a looming presence over the heart of this classic farce?

“Basically it was our producer Kim Poster,” he replies.

“She was very keen that we should work together on something less heavy after the Miller (All My Sons) and the O’Neill (Long Day’s Journey Into Night) and coincidentally I’d also been looking for something lighter for some time and I was very interested in doing a comedy.

“Of course, I am a man and I think that I agreed to Kim’s idea with slight trepidation because of that fact.

“However, once I’d looked into it and realised that such notable actors as Brian Bedford on Broadway and Geoffrey Rush in Australia had played Lady Bracknell, I could see that I’d be following in a line of leading male performers and I felt more comfortable.

"Had there not been such precedents, I’m not sure I’d have agreed to the suggestion.”

Given that David is an actor who pays meticulous attention to the physical aspects of a character while exploring his/her psychology, how would his Lady Bracknell sound, walk and talk?

“I’m not making her a pantomime dame with a falsetto voice. I’ll also be wearing a boned corset which means that you can’t slouch and that you have to sit on the edge of your seat with your back straight,” he says.

"As we can tell from Lady Bracknell’s close questioning of Jack on his financial circumstances, she is a practical woman.

“I think that she’s more nouveau riche than true upper class,” argues David.

“As she herself admits she had no fortune of any kind until she met and married Lord Bracknell. As a convert to the upper classes, she has become grander than the genuine aristocracy.”

There have been many Lady Bracknells since the play was first performed in 1895 including giants of the theatre such as Judi Dench, Penelope Keith, Maggie Smith and Patricia Routledge.

All have been faced with a perennial problem.

How to deliver that tiny, two-word phrase “A handbag!” and so liberate it from the shadow cast over it by the late Dame Edith Evans, a celebrated Lady Bracknell in her day.

“Everybody asks you about that line and I intend to play it for real,” reports David.

“Ironically, Edith Evans is said to have regretted saying it in that way. It’s now akin to warning an actor about to play Hamlet that he should look out for the “To be or not to be” speech.

"And in any case, it is not the hand-bag that is the scandalous part of the story but the fact that it was discovered in a cloakroom at Victoria Station.”

Lady Bracknell likes to express herself with characteristic eloquence and weight and that poses problems for David.

“These are the longest sentences which I’ve ever had to learn.

"However, it’s your job to embrace that language: it would be such a mistake to cut it up and so break its particular rhythm. You have to find the breath to drive through those sentences”

It seems that a large section of the audience will be seeing The Importance of Being Earnest for the first time.

How would David describe the play to the newcomers?

“Wilde gave it the subtitle A Trivial Comedy for Serious People and as has often been said, playing comedy is a serious business. 

“The Importance of Being Earnest is a glorious English farce in which Wilde mercilessly satirises the upper classes.”

Tickets for The Importance of Being Earnest, which runs until Saturday, June 6 are on sale from Mayflower Theatre Box Office tel: 02380 711811 or online at mayflower.org.uk.

For Ovation Restaurant bookings call 02380 711833