The Importance of Being Earnest Archives - Page 2 of 3

★★★★

“it is ultimately the cast’s joyful delivery that decorates this production with festoons of colour”

Despite the initial success of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”, its opening coincidentally marked his fall from grace at the height of his career. Wilde would write no further comic or dramatic work and his notoriety caused the West End premiere to be pulled. Even the ensuing Broadway run closed after just sixteen performances. It is a sad paradox that mirrors those firmly embedded in his writing but, fortunately for theatre audiences worldwide, the play survived and has stood the test of time; to become what has been described as “the second most known and quoted play in English after Hamlet”.

This familiarity can be a curse as well as a blessing for directors. David Phipps-Davis’ production at the Tabard Theatre, however, certainly falls into the latter with its lovingly faithful and light-hearted joyride through the lives and double lives of these mischievous characters. Yes, we may be on very safe ground, but the cast of eight keep us on high alert throughout with their expertly subtle handling of the text. Nothing seems overplayed, which allows space for the nonsense and illogicality to leap out of the dialogue.

The bizarre plot ridicules Victorian sensibilities, but here, set three decades later in the twenties, it loses none of the punch. It is the story of two bachelors, John ‘Jack’ Worthington and Algernon ‘Algy’ Moncrieff, who create alter egos named Ernest to escape their tiresome lives. Attempting to win the hearts of two women, the pair struggle to keep up with their own stories and become tangled in a tale of deception, disguise and misadventure.

Samuel Oakes as ‘Algy’ and Tim Gibson as ‘Jack’ have a natural onstage chemistry, bouncing off each other while pitching the dialogue with the ease of a juggler. Throwing their lines into the air, they never let any of them drop. Lady Bracknell is similarly natural, played with a welcome understatement by Non Vaughan-O’Hagan who neatly highlights the snobbery and materialism without resorting to caricature. Melissa Knighton captures the curt crispness of Gwendolen’s unassailable pretension in a strong professional debut performance. Kirsty Jackson occasionally slips into jarring histrionics as the hopeless romantic, Cecily, but otherwise endears us to her mad-as-a-hatter waywardness. Jo Ashe sparkles as her governess, Miss Prism, refreshingly unveiling a softer side with flirtatious asides that belie the prudish veneer. The apple of her eye is Canon Chasuble, played by Dean Harris who never fails to put a smile on your face when he wanders, bumbling, onto the stage. And to cap it all Paul Foulds gives a star turn as the valet, the butler, the gardener, the chauffeur and Mr Gribsby – the solicitor who turns up to arrest Algernon for unpaid hotel bills – a ‘lost’ character reinstated by Phipps-Davis from an early draft of the script.

Lacking the darker undertones of Wilde’s earlier work, this interpretation is playful and stylised but measured out strictly within the confines of respectability. While Leah Sams’ costumes are as colourful as the language, the inbuilt irreverence sometimes appears monochrome. But it is ultimately the cast’s joyful delivery that decorates this production with festoons of colour.

Reviewed by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Andreas Grieger

The Importance of Being Earnest

The Watermill Theatre

Reviewed – 27th May 2019

★★★★

“an inventive new take on an old favourite”

Should we care about ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’? Oscar Wilde’s best-known play about misplaced identities was written at the height of his fame. His brilliant wit shines in every scene and the piece features that line about a piece of left luggage that is probably as much quoted as ‘to be or not to be’.

The Watermill’s new production partly attempts to prove its relevance by setting the play in a contemporary apartment, which is all dull grey minimalism, and in the opening scene, decorated with a road traffic cone. It’s the kind of achingly trendy place that’s all concealed doors and cupboards, with a big Morris wallpaper feature wall, which in Sally Ferguson’s lighting design is cleverly lit to match the mood. At the start of the play the set seemed simply incongruous, lacking the glitz that might be expected of a London socialite’s pad. Weirdly, the cups are paper and the plates foil, a kind of knowing send-up that seemed just odd in the first half, but made perfect sense in the second when the play takes a surreal turn. The almost empty apartment does however come complete with a fully-liveried butler, played with glassy-eyed determination by the impressive Morgan Philpott. He begins and ends the show, as well as sustaining a crowd-pleasingly clever running gag throughout it that calls for the most impeccable timing.

So the scene is set for an inventive new take on an old favourite, as much beloved of amateur productions as it is of countless high profile cinema and stage versions. The lead, Algernon, is played by a splendidly gangling Peter Bray (RSC and the Globe). Wilde seems to have put most of himself into this ‘Bunburying’ young fop who gets some of the best lines. Bray more than rises to the challenge. As Jack, Benedict Salter is also excellent. In a splendid piece of direction by the very inventive Kate Budgen, Bray and Salter perform a kind of mad pas-de-deux to a Liszt piano concerto in a scene about muffins. ‘I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them’. Much has been written about the gay sub-text, in a play which was written when to be ‘earnest’ was to be gay. What with the Bunburying and cucumbers for ready money, it certainly doesn’t lack in innuendo, and this was nicely handled in this production.

Both young men and their female opposite numbers, Gwendolen (Claudia Jolly) and Cecily (Charlotte Beaumont), are splendidly dressed in period costumes. Wilde’s young women may be trapped in a suffocating Victorian system where a woman’s marriage is more about money than love, but his characters shine in these interpretations. Charlotte Beaumont in particular has a kind of winningly mad insistence, that in the second half almost took the play into Lewis Carroll territory.

And what of Lady Bracknell’s ‘handbag’ line, so famously delivered with ringing disdain by Edith Evans, then whispered by Maggie Smith in a role also played by Judi Dench and even David Suchet? Connie Walker certainly brings the ‘gorgon’ to life in her commanding interpretation. Wendy Nottingham makes a suitably dowdy Miss Prism, and Jim Creighton is a satisfying Dr Chasuble.

‘To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of modern life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution’. Just for lines like this, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ is more than worth the price of a ticket. This fresh and inventive new production at the Watermill makes it more than doubly so.

Tag Archives: The Importance of Being Earnest

The Importance of Being Earnest
★★★★

Tabard Theatre

Tabard Theatre

Reviewed – 9th June 2019

★★★★

“it is ultimately the cast’s joyful delivery that decorates this production with festoons of colour”

Reviewed by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Andreas Grieger