Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is a play that consistently resists any attempt to add seriousness or gravity to the production. Terribly witty and full of pithy epigrams, the play has no message and no overall theme. Mask and Bauble’s lively and entertaining production, running through Sunday, falters when it tries to imbue this terminally frivolous play with pathos and drama.
The story deals with two young dandies in 19th century London who have false identities that allow them to escape their own lives at will while maintaining an air of respectability. Trouble ensues when the identities of these boys are found out during their attempts to get married. But the plot is immaterial—The Importance of Being Earnest is foremost about wit and wordplay, an opportunity for Wilde to insert as many clever, irreverent lines as he possibly can.
The cast of this production clearly understands this, spouting off their English-accented lines in dizzying turns of phrase and elaborate sentences. There is a danger with lines like these to focus on the individual words at the expense of the narrative and whole statements, but by and large the actors manage the balance of plot and language well.
The play is long and verbose, and listening to two people spout witty lines at each other for an extended period of time can occasionally get tedious. The production really shines, however, at times like these: in the bits off to the side of the stage, be they with the butler’s irreverence, physical comedy with tea sets and muffins or just the wonderful expressions on the faces of many of the actors.
The costumes for both the setting and the characters are spot on, thanks to costume designer Rita Valkovskaya. Lady Bracknell’s ridiculous hat and Worthing’s tasseled “garb of woe” are of particular excellence.
The set of Earnest is ingenious, based (as an exhibit in the hall explains) on the actual designs of the Reading Gaol prisons. The bars of the prison become the sides of the set in a truly amazing way, serving as a constant reminder of the prison scenes as well. It is a simple set but an effective one, and it gets everyone where they need to be when they need to be there.
But you don’t remember a prison being involved in The Importance of Being Earnest? Well, there’s the problem. Before and after every act, main character Algernon Moncrieff (Ian Fahey) plays Oscar Wilde himself during his time in the Reading Gaol for “gross indecency,” i.e. homosexuality. He recites passages from a letter Wilde wrote to his lover during his imprisonment. It’s an interesting idea for bringing gravity into the work, but unfortunately, it doesn’t work. There is no real connection between Wilde’s imprisonment and the world of Earnest, and while the stage transformations work beautifully, the transition for the audience is hardly as smooth.
The knowledge of Wilde’s imprisonment adds nothing important to the story and causes the plot to falter. The ending is totally ruined, as the famous last line—“I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital importance of being earnest”—is undercut by an incongruous change back to the prison setting. Attempts to underscore the connection between these two settings, such as prison numbers on the main characters, backs, only come off as heavy handed or incomprehensible.
Earnest is certainly a good production. It is funny, with a good understanding of the rhythms and feeling of the original play. Furthermore, it’s well acted, engaging and full of wonderfully inventive bits. But while it attempts to be a revelatory interpretation of a well-known play, unfortunately, it is not.
