I can’t think of many plays that have left such a strong footprint as The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde’s comedy has been parodied, pastiched and plundered by, among others, Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett and Joe Orton. It has been filmed several times, inspired musicals and an opera and is one of the most quoted plays in the language. Yet, as Max Webster’s new production is about to open at the National Theatre, it strikes me that Wilde’s work is still the subject of endless debate. What kind of play is it and how do we stage it today? These are the questions that still divide opinion.
People have been arguing about the true nature of the play ever since its premiere in 1895. Wilde himself described it as “a delicate bubble of fancy”, but added: “It has its philosophy.” At the time its philosophy was hard to discern. The critic William Archer spoke for many when he said the play was nothing “except a sort of rondo capriccioso, in which the artist’s fingers run with crisp irresponsibility up and down the keyboard of life”. Only after Wilde’s arrest did people begin to see that a play in which the two male leads invent fictive personae in order to escape domestic obligations was a metaphor for the author’s own double life.
Today, I would suggest, we realise that the play is both funny and serious at the same time. It was Eric Bentley in The Modern Theatre (1948) who argued that “Wilde is as much a moralist as Bernard Shaw” and saw that The Importance offered a running commentary on class, money, marriage, economics, social hypocrisy, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. That view inevitably affected theatre folk, and when Peter Hall directed the play at the National in 1982 he saw it as “a satire on the upper-class marriage market” with everyone, including Judi Dench’s magnificent Lady Bracknell, showing their desperate desire for a profitable alliance.
But, while Hall took a clear line, there is an ongoing debate about how the play should be staged: one that reveals our divided approach to the classics. It came to a head in 1974, in the early days of Hall’s tenure when the National was still at the Old Vic and Jonathan Miller proposed doing an all-male production. Harold Pinter strenuously objected, arguing that one should respect an author’s intentions; Miller stood by a director’s right to reinterpret a play in any way they choose. Hall himself and associate director Michael Blakemore backed Miller while Olivier and John Dexter, also an associate director, supported Pinter. In the end, though, the project was abandoned, mainly for economic reasons.
Today it would seem Miller’s view prevails, and there have been numerous attempts to reinvent Wilde: some successful, some not. In 2005 the Abbey theatre in Dublin offered an all-male version with Wilde himself as an onstage character. Ten years later, at London’s Vaudeville theatre, David Suchet was a majestically mercenary Lady Bracknell, itemising Mr Worthing’s assets with glittering precision.
I much preferred that to Lucy Bailey’s age-blind production of 2014 at, ironically, the Harold Pinter theatre, in which Martin Jarvis and Nigel Havers repeated the roles of Jack and Algernon they had played 32 years earlier in the Peter Hall version: the concept, that we were watching an am-dram company staging a dress rehearsal in a country house, struck me as a licence for overacting. Even less appealing was Michael Fentiman’s 2018 revival at the Vaudeville, which seemed determined to heighten the play’s sexuality: we had Algy ostentatiously kissing his manservant and Jack discovered on the verge of orally satisfying Gwendolen. It is true that Wilde was a big influence on Orton, but here the process was rudely reversed.
That doesn’t invalidate attempts to reimagine the play for today. But for me the test of any production is whether it reconciles Wilde’s spiralling absurdity and social commentary, and whether it respects the sublime elegance of his language. As Gwendolen herself says, “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing.” That strikes me as a good note for Wilde’s modern interpreters.
The Importance of Being Earnest is at the National Theatre, London, 21 November-25 January, and in cinemas worldwide from 20 February
