Everyone is having a grand time on stage in Max Webster’s exuberant new production of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Lyttelton Theatre (NT Live will show it in movie theaters in February).
And I enjoyed myself very much, too—if not, perhaps, quite as much as everyone on stage. The cast—all of them outstanding—has mastered a particular style of British comedy: part panto, part public school gender subversion and part, of course, Oscar Wilde.
It’s a dream cast: sexy Ncuti Gatwa as Algernon, hapless Hugh Skinner as Jack, randy Ronke Adekoluejo and Eliza Scanlon as their love objects, and the incomparable Sharon D. Clarke as Lady Bracknell. Amanda Lawrence, Richard Cant and Julian Bleach provide luxury casting in the smaller roles.
Having become a bit wearied of the tendency toward minimal sets and costumes, I was delighted by the explosion of color and detail in this production. Did the National blow its entire year’s budget on this show? If so, I’m glad to have been the beneficiary of such a profusion of design talent.
This superabundance extends to the sexual desire shown by all the characters: Algy is attracted to Jack, Cecily wishes to pleasure Gwendolen, Miss Prism suggestively fingers a fern while talking to Canon Chasable, and everyone wants to fondle the nude statues in Jack’s country house.
This is all great fun, but a small part of me hung back from fully embracing it. It brings out into the open what Wilde hid under the surface. That may be the right approach for our age, where we are much more likely to embrace all that needed to stay hidden or implied in Wilde’s time.
But the plot is still the plot: two men determined to marry two women, who are equally determined to marry them. That both the men are “Bunburyists” tells us what we need to know about their hidden lives. That they both feel compelled to marry tells us what we need to know about public expectations in the world they live in.
And the dialogue is still Wilde’s stiletto-like dissection of Victorian hypocrisy. This artificiality of both dialogue and characters is surely Wilde’s way of mocking the artificial social and moral conventions of his day, conventions that put his own life in danger. Webster’s flamboyant production certainly gets the artificiality, but what I miss in this delightful celebration of liberated sexuality is an awareness that society has a tendency to force inconvenient or unacceptable desire into hiding, even to the point of imprisoning those who don’t hide their disruptive desires.
We know Sharon Clarke as DCI Ellis, from the eponymous Brit police procedural. She’s got a knack for solving murders, fiercely, with chips on her shoulders like epaulettes. It’s not hard to imagine her assuming the role of the brittle, imperious Lady Bracknell.
This show sounds pretty lively for drawing room satire,
written with culturally and legally-imposed restraint. I probably prefer Wilde Restrained, having burned-out on camp—maybe too many episodes of “Are You Being Served?”, or slight, maudlin jukebox musicals. I feel about camp the way I feel about a James Taylor concert—I don’t hate it, but don’t need to see it again.
Perhaps Lady Bracknell will become a signature role for Sharon Clarke, as
it did for Dame Edith Evans, who cast a long shadow with it long after she’d become famous in the West End and the Old Vic. She tired of it, but did appear in the best film version, in 1952—a sumptuous, faithful Technicolor presentation with Michael Redgrave, a purring Joan Greenwood, and perhaps inevitably for the time, the wobbly-jawed Margaret Rutherford as Miss Prism (Tynan thought she could do all her acting with that jaw).
That said, the film isn’t exceptional. Set-bound, nothing (in all senses!) is opened-up. The director Anthony Asquith (whose father, as Home Secretary, ordered Wilde’s arrest) had a good run of filming theater adaptions—“Pygmalian” with Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller comes to mind.
Maybe Shaw fingered the problem., that the play was witty but uninvolving.
Maybe I’m talking myself into a more flamboyant take.
Edith Evans had a long, lauded career, even after ‘Earnest.” Including more film—three Academy award nominations!
So may Sharon Clarke get everything possible out of Lady Bracknell, indeed, let her cast a shadow over it for a time, but not over what one hopes will be a long body of work.
https://youtu.be/oVQIB-QuooU?si=IoOfL_LVEXb2YvaB
Late breaking: In February the Estate of Barry “Dame Edna” Humphries auctioned a pile of fine collectibles—paintings, drawings, books, ephemera—at Christie’s (London).
The TLS noted that it included a first edition of “Earnest”, one of twelve presentation copies on Japanese vellum and inscribed by Wilde to his publisher “in sincere friendship and astonishment.” Estimated at £100,000-£150,000, it was finally hammered down at £138,000. A passel of possums, er, children, grandchildren and a fourth wife, are presumably astonished at the €4.6 million total haul. A further auction of his library is pending.