The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde at The Mac, Belfast on April 11th 2017
THE
IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST
by
OSCAR WILDE
at
the
THE
MAC, BELFAST
On
Tuesday
11th of April, 2017
Team
Director Lisa May
Musical
Director Matthew Reeve
Designer Diana Ennis
Lighting Designer Zia Bergin-Holly (Irish Times Theatre
award winner - Best Lighting Design)
Cast
Lady
Bracknell Ross
Anderson-Doherty
Miss
Prism Richard Croxford
Cecily
Cardew Chris Robinson
Hon.
Gwendolyn Fairfax Samuel
Townsend
Algernon
Moncrieff Joseph
Derrington
Jack
Worthing Joseph
O'Malley
Dr. F Chasuble Karl O'Neill
Richard Wagner’s opera ‘Tannhauser’
provides a suitable prelude to The Mac’s new production of Oscar Wilde’s farce ‘The
Importance of Being Earnest’. Wilde (and
Freud) greatly admired the opera with its themes of sacred and profane love,
clearly greatly appealed to the author whose life and works are so deeply
intertwined.
Bruiser Theatre company’s
new production of Oscar Wilde’s wittiest farce is a conflicted tour de force,
conflicted because its topical discourse summons up disparate, possibly
confused cultural messages. Most
historical plays deal with irrelevant or forgotten issues like the Salic Law,
the heredity of Scottish Kings but Wilde’s play, written in 1895, is implicated
as specifically concerned with the issue of Gay marriage which is still illegal
in Northern Ireland. The issue is
foregrounded in the play by an extended conceit. For all the female parts are taken by men.
The production re-casts
the play as a musical but as we know there are really two versions and the
longer one with the fourth act is sometimes substituted for the shorter,
wittier version. The structure of the
original play remains but it is now surrounded by musical interludes performed
by the cast who also double as Oscar Wilde clones with identical long, wavy
hair, white and cream suits replete with brown cravats. These foppish clones/clowns allude to the
Aesthetic Movement, founded by Wilde, which was an antidote to Establishment
mediocrity. The cultural, social,
political Establishment of the late Victorian era held onto a virtual monopoly
of talent which Wilde, being neither British nor upper-class, somehow intruded
upon. As an Irishman of the middle-classes
(Wilde’s father was a surgeon and his mother a notable poet) Wilde was suddenly
thrust into an alien milieu. Following
on from Walter Pater and John Ruskin, Wilde’s doctrine of art for art’s sake
aestheticism began to be outlined in his novel ‘The Picture of Dorian Grey’ and
the major plays written by him in the 1890s.
The most important of these is ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ simply
because it is the funniest, most cleverly written and deals with issues of
origins and identity that specifically concerned class-ridden Victorian
society. The Aesthetic Movement was a
counter-culture alternative to the Establishment’s syndrome of mediocrity and
poor taste and the contrastingly frothily witty Wildean excess was also the
birth of camp and kitsch so vital to our Post-Modern sensibility.
Of course, the
Elizabethan theatre forbade women to take up roles so in a sense this
interpretation of Wilde’s play side steps the last 500 years or so of
mainstream theatrical development, existing in a kind of independent time
warp. For it seems to this reviewer that
the play is intent on upholding the monopoly of talent and that this meaning or
message is essentially working against any understanding of Wilde’s works and
methods. This is the meaning behind the
doubling, tripling then quadrupling of the Wilde’s. Somehow the one has become a multitude ready
to leap, like the Gadarene swine, into the mouths, minds, souls of the audience. Now the Wilde’s are everywhere, in everything,
soon they will occupy the entire world, the entire cosmos which will then be
blown up into an enormous bubble only to be popped with a tiny, an infinitesimally
tiny pin. The anti-heroic, anti-climax
of the Wildean apocalypse carved out on the bum of each of the multiplex Wilde’s
subsumed to a tiny horizon line complete with miniature Wilde’s hanging off
cliffs, bluffs and oases.
Bernard Shaw said the
play was ‘heartless’ but it must be that he had picked up on the spirit of camp
that permeates the play. In a certain
sense, the play is not heartless but seeks to depict a society bound up with
insincerity, superficiality and the pursuit of fruitless goals like social rank
and respectability while having to deny the facts of one’s own identity to
maintain them as opposed to ardour, truthfulness and actual social relationships. Perhaps Shaw was heartless, it seems likely
since he must have been watching another play, perhaps one that he had written
in his own mind as a counterblast to Wilde.
However, Shaw’s response is typical of the contemporary reviews penned
by journalists and newspapers reviewers.
The play was pulled after just 86 performances because, by that time, Wilde
had become embroiled in an infamous libel suit with the Marquess of Queensbury. In fact, Queensbury had planned to throw a
bouquet of rotten vegetables at Wilde during the first performance but, in the
end, was prevented from entering the theatre by the police whom Wilde had
astutely summoned.
The stand out performance
is Ross Anderson-Doherty’s Lady Bracknell in a role which is permeated with
witticisms and ironies. In its review
The Stage is right to praise his enunciation which is clearly the key to Lady
Bracknell’s comedy turn. The direction
of Lisa May is also pre-eminent as suggested by The Stage. She has a clear vision of how the play might
communicate to an audience today. The
play’s MacGuffin, Nurse Prism’s bag, is returned to her via the orphaned Jack
who also happens to be named after the town of Worthing in Sussex (it is, he
intimates, a town in Sussex, fancy that!) for the bag with the baby was found
in the lost and found room at Victoria train station. Jack/Earnest is really the son of Lady
Bracknell’s sister and an English General whose name was lost (and found). Essentially the plot is as vapid as those
Victorian Penny Dreadfuls, tawdry novels depicting loose morals and looser
authorship. Wilde had latched onto the
salient fact that audiences tended to enjoy formulas, conceits and stock
characters. He had learnt how to use these, how to deploy clichés by
undermining their most distinct qualities and essences.
That’s why Wilde’s play
is still relevant today for unfortunately those clichés, formulas and conceits
are still circulating the Province, Northern Ireland, Ulster whereas the rest
of the world has somehow banished them, however incompletely. Why can’t we move on? Because of the monopoly of power presided
over by the Free Presbyterian Church and the Democratic Unionist Party. However, after the recent elections to the N.I.
Assembly it appears that the monopoly has been shaken. The elections were a consequence of the
Renewable Heating Scheme, a fake attempt to redistribute public funds to
friends and family by First Minister, Arlene Foster in the name of Green Political
Correctness. In short, Sinn Fein have come
within a whisker of becoming the first party and may yet do so. Which, as Wilde would have assented, is a
very interesting situation, one which will impact on the issue of Gay marriage
among many other things.
Paul Murphy, The Mac, April
2017
Comments