Theatre - Katherine Duncan-Jones on a production of Wilde's classic which rises above shallow realism

Although presented as a luscious period piece in Peter Hall's production, Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) is surprisingly modern. We might think that it would be impossible to persuade a 21st-century audience to care about Mrs Erlynne's desperate desire to be readmitted to society - in Wilde's parlance, the group of moneyed aristocrats within which men are encouraged to be amusingly "bad" while ladies are required to maintain unblemished reputations. But whether or not society still exists, in the Margaret Thatcher sense, versions of Wilde's certainly do. Ambitious Englishmen are as keen as ever to form themselves into mutually affirming clubs defined at the edges by others, often mature women, whom they conspicuously banish. This is especially so in politics and the media. For Mrs Erlynne, read Gwyneth Dunwoody, Elizabeth Filkin or Janet Street-Porter.

Wilde's earliest social comedy is wonderfully economical, well written and well plotted. Joely Richardson is a lovely, elegant, innocently snobbish Lady Windermere who seems also vulnerable and alone. She is too much in need of the mother she has never known to be able to function properly as a mother herself. Though eventually crucial in the denouement, her baby is confined to the wings. Wilde does not even tell us, as his contemporary J M Barrie surely would have done, whether Lady Windermere finds a moment, between tea and dinner, to look in on the nursery. But it is clear that her exquisitely furnished drawing room - designed by John Gunter - will never feel the touch of sticky fingers.

Act One belongs to Lady Windermere, and it's as well that the fascinating Mrs Erlynne is not seen until Act Two, for there is no doubt that, as soon as she appears, Vanessa Redgrave completely upstages her real-life daughter. Not only does Redgrave come across convincingly as a brilliant manipulator of the society she besieges, winning over prudish dowagers and stuffy old buffers within seconds of her arrival at the Windermeres' party, but also her superb performance in the last act lifts Wilde's late Victorian melodrama to a level that could be called genuinely tragic. Redgrave's Mrs Erlynne discovers herself imprisoned by her self-invented greedy and socially ruthless persona. There can be no return to the conventional family life she once briefly knew.

Throughout, there are grim foreshadowings of the stony path along which Wilde himself was to travel in 1895. Three major characters go off to live abroad, and the deeper question seems: just how "bad" is a man permitted to be before the society that has found him so amusing will cast him out?

The essentially self-regarding quality of all Wilde's characters is presented with unfailing charm by a supporting cast that no director of lesser status than Hall could have assembled. It is led by Googie Withers as the monstrous but monstrously entertaining Duchess of Berwick, and her husband John McCallum as the duchess's dim-witted brother Lord Augustus, nicknamed Tuppy. Using first-class performers even for the cameo roles really pays off - Peter Gordon as the imperturbable butler Parker, for instance, brings the house down, as does Roger Hammond as the wonderfully vain clubman Mr Dumby. The younger generation are equally affecting, especially Jack Davenport as the rakish Darlington and David Yelland as the wooden-seeming Windermere. An evening that promised only shallow escapism proves to be surprisingly deep.

Lady Windermere's Fan is at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London SW1 (0870 901 3356), until 8 June

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