Some will still tell you that lying to yourself is worse than lying to others. But simultaneously triumphing at both, as Oscar Wilde himself might have said, requires panache and a good lie down. Throughout The Importance of Being Earnest, we see Jack (Carl Gregory) and Algernon (Anna Lambert), struggling under the weights of their own privileged, hedonistic deceits. Together they hide in those vain, prideful corners of ourselves that we all strive to keep a secret.

The play resonates with audiences for another reason. It is canonical. It's a matinee standard. We normally know what to expect from a staging of old Earnest.

Directors Rylee O'Rourke and Nicholas Thoroughgood are to be commended for staking their claim to a different corner. They've heaved the grand piano of our expectations out of the penthouse window, then danced upon the wreckage of ivory below.

Forget that they've cast a female to play Algernon, or a bloke to play Gwendolen Fairfax (a deliciously snide Campbell Knox). Or even that Lane (Richard Rae) first appears wearing a Walkman, hoovering a room straight out of Scarface. The quality of this production derives from even more peculiar, inventive origins than that.

But maybe it's those kind of inventions, those truly unexpected embellishments of imagination, that mark a genuinely impressive piece of direction. When Miss Prism (Rebecca Skinner) gets swallowed by a banana lounge, the two ladies seated in front of me caught the giggles. What they were chuckling at was pure invention, created by O'Rourke and Thoroughgood and then made even funnier by it's superfluousness.

Of course not all of it worked. A repetitive, slapstickiness crept into the end of Act One and Dimity Eveleens didn't quite grasp the sharp, imperious edges of Lady Bracknell. The first appearance of Miss Prism and Cecily Cardew (Maddison Lamb) marked a definite slip in energy.

But in every other moment, the play overflows with energy: a heady, frenetic unravelling of calamity. Even in a Blue Brothers hat ... and Ray Bans - his mash-up of hooligan and dandy - Gregory doesn't leap too far into the unknown. He is always an innately comedic performer, who in this play embodies the panicky bewilderment of Jack with a disciplined precision.

Leaping further across the chasm from tradition to invention is Anna Lambert. She makes it to the other side, scoffing at the rest who she has gleefully left behind. Lambert's Algernon is a slinking, flouncy and brilliant shambles. She's what might have evolved had Ace Ventura spent the night with Eddy from Ab Fab. She is the Artful Dodger, dressed for breakfast by Dr. Karl.

Lambert even dares to transform the most cherished of Algernon's lines - the one about girls becoming their mothers - into an outlandish satire of itself. It's a ploy that works, like so much of this production, by mocking the sanctity of its own cleverness. Just as Wilde himself would have done.