The Importance of Being Earnest

by Oscar Wilde

seen by live streaming from the Vaudeville Theatre on 9 October 2018

Dominic Dromgoole has created a theatre company to perform all of Oscar Wilde's social comedies and some related works; this is the fourth major production. Michael Fentiman directs Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as Jack, Fehinti Balogun as Algernon, Sophie Thompson as Lady Bracknell, Pippa Nixon as Gwendolen, Fiona Button as Cecily, Stella Gonet as Miss Prism and Jeremy Swift as Canon Chasuble in this, perhaps the most brilliant play of its kind.

Almost nothing can detract from the perfect poise of Wilde's writing; the aphorisms and witty repartee, the clever inversions that reveal social snobberies and prejudices with rapier-thrust accuracy, flow from the lips of almost all the characters as the absurdities of the situation mount up and then are almost as absurdly resolved. It would seem that the only things counting against it are its reputation and the shadow of some overpowering performances from the past (for example, Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell).

In many ways this production hits the right note, with the cast on the whole managing the delivery of the lines more successfully than in the other two productions I have seen. Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Pippa Nixon and in particular Sophie Thompson are the best at this, though Fiona Button is too modern in her deportment for a teenaged girl of that time, and unfortunately it is clear that Wilde's vocal style works best with a late nineteenth-century physical restraint.  

However, I have serious reservations about some of the directorial and design decisions. The social comedy relies on the social context which it is satirising, and it is dangerous to ignore this; false notes are an unwelcome distraction. The first false note is the presence of a peculiarly explicit painting of two naked men grappling one another, which is given prominence in Algernon's living room. It is simply inconceivable that any gentleman would have had such a thing on public display in a room which ladies would be likely to visit (especially, perhaps, relations).

More seriously, the relationship between Algernon and Lane (his butler) is conceived as far more intimate than it should be. Lane remains on stage for a considerable stretch when the stage directions explicitly indicate that he is not there, and Algernon lights him a cigarette, offers him sherry and indulges in the occasional kiss. It is just plain wrong, a complete distraction from the real business of the play, and a needless sacrifice of any genuine social comment that might be made of the badinage between them, which is if anything a precursor of the Jeeves and Wooster situation, not the cover for a surreptitious sexual fling. 

A similar social barrier is needlessly crossed in a small dumbshow scene in which Cecily shares an illicit cigarette with Moulton the gardener behind Miss Prism's back. Cecily may have a wild imagination, but the sheer impropriety of this idea threatens to ruin the whole ambience in which she moves. Equally the presentation of Merriman as an outdoors servant (open shirt and no jacket) overburdened with the supposed Ernest's luggage, when he is obviously a superior house servant who would have ordered the footmen to deal with the luggage, is a serious misreading of how a wealthy country household would have been run. 

Finally, the marvellous scene in which Cecily and Gwendolen descend from superficial effusiveness to icy politeness to silent hostility is just about ruined by the crassness of the sugar and cake business at the end. (Indeed the consumption of food in general too often degenerated into incipient custard pie moments when again absolute adherence to social norms generates the comedy.) No well brought up young lady of that period would grab a tea cake and pull it apart with her hands and then allow a servant to touch it while handing it over even to a rival. The whole point of the scene is that the ritual of afternoon tea is pursued with absolute correctness but without paying attention to what the guest has asked for.

It's curious that I accept many directorial interventions in modern Shakespeare productions, but I think that attempts to introduce subplots into Oscar Wilde's plays - which all three productions that I have seen in this season have done - are a distracting failure. There is simply no room for them; the plays are not about secret romances belowstairs, and even less about shenanigans between upstairs and downstairs, and to interpolate such things as a modish modern joke or knowing social comment is simply gratuitous. The catastrophe of what Wilde himself suffered in a homophobic society is very well known, but it does neither him nor his social comedies any favours to pretend that they are the place to show what could not in reality be shown or referred to.

It's a pity, really, that these gem-likef plays should not have been trusted to entertain today's audiences on their own merits.