The cast of the National Theatre’s 2024 production of The Importance of Being Earnest
I was unable to get to London to see the National Theatre’s recent production of The Importance of Being Earnest, so was glad to be able to attend a screening at my local cinema.
The production was a riot from beginning to end. There is a sense that the actors have been indulged in their ideas for any bit of business that might get a laugh, and if Wilde had been present at rehearsals I can imagine him scribbling instructions in the margins of his prompt script for them to be a little more serious (as he did in the prompt script for his first play), but it was difficult not to be carried away by the exuberance of the show. Most of the actors were excellent – I particularly enjoyed Eliza Scanlen’s Cecily, in which I detected more than a hint of Miranda Richardson’s bonkers Queen Elizabeth I from Blackadder II. Sharon D. Clarke was a formidable Lady Bracknell and Hugh Skinner a suitably exasperated Jack.
Eliza Scanlen as Cecily Cardew and Ncuti Gatwa as Algernon Moncrieff
One of the joys for anyone who knows the play is anticipating how the jokes will land for an audience who is perhaps encountering the piece for the first time. At the premiere in 1895 Wilde was relieved when a tidal wave of laughter swept through the St James’s Theatre in response to George Alexander, the first Jack Worthing, silently making his Act II entrance in full mourning dress – it showed that the audience had followed the plot. This visual gag can still inspire an equally tumultuous reception 130 years later.
The real joy of the play, though, is in the language. A few of the best lines missed their mark, partly, I suspect, because of how they were delivered. As the late comedian Frank Carson always appreciated, good jokes only get you half way to a laugh: it also matters how you tell ’em. But there were new and unexpected delights to be had in the NT production. Those of us who were waiting for Clarke’s take on the famous ‘a handbag?’ line were instead amused by her discovering comic potential in Algy’s ‘coo-cumber sandwiches’.
Ncuti Gatwa as Algy, playing the piano ‘with wonderful expression’.
Max Webster, the director of the production, has spoken about the queer subtext of the play (for example, in an enlightening interview for The Play Podcast). Algy and Jack’s double lives do seem to parallel Wilde’s own juggling of his marriage and multiple affairs, though ‘Bunbury’ doesn't have the hidden meaning that some have suggested, and the less said about phallic cucumbers the better. Then again, only a right sourpuss would complain about the opening of the NT production, when Ncuti Gatwa’s Algy enters in a fuchsia ballgown and thunders away at a grand piano with wonderful expression while surrounded by drag kings and queens.
This is a play about male–female romantic relationships, but Webster has turned it into a sexual free-for-all. At one point, all four of the younger characters fling themselves on a sofa; Skinner emerges from the tangle of arms and legs and declares that he hardly knows whom he is kissing. Hardly knows and hardly minds, seems to be the point. Algy and Jack bicker like an old married couple, while Cecily feeds Gwendolen cake and Gwendolen is discovered upon the curtain rising on Act III with her head under Cecily’s skirts. For me, the boys’ flirtations were smoothly integrated and believable in a way that the girls’ were not. In the script, the humour of Gwendolen and Cecily’s first meeting derives chiefly from their initially restrained antagonism developing into a sense of sisterhood, just as Jack and Algy had predicted it would in the preceding scene. In the NT production, surreptitious glances and silent moments of supposed self-realisation are crammed between Wilde’s quick-fire lines. The sexual tension doesn’t quite come off, and there really isn’t sufficient time and space for it in a play that Wilde intended to go ‘like a pistol shot’.
But there were some additions that benefitted the play. Adaptors of Wilde often yield to the temptation to insert new lines into his masterpieces. This is risky: Wilde’s own lines are so expertly crafted that to dream of improving on them is the definition of hubris. But the audience at the National Theatre and the cinema in which I saw Webster’s production chuckled when Algy received bills not only from the Savoy (the scene of Wilde's own trysts) but from the modern queer venue Dalston Superstore. To get away with this sort of thing a production has to have built up a certain amount of good will. Webster and his cast had done just that.
The cast of the National Theatre’s 2024 production of The Importance of Being Earnest
Quite sensibly, Webster left on the cutting room floor the notorious ‘Gribsby episode’ (in which a solicitor descends upon the Manor House at Woolton with the intention of obliging Ernest – whoever that may be – to pay his debts). Wilde had wanted to keep this; Alexander refused, and the play is the better for it. But Webster has reinstated some material. I noticed in the scene with Cecily, Miss Prism, and Canon Chasuble several references to politics that had been trimmed from the play as it was originally performed and published. For example, learning that ‘Ernest’ (Algy) plans to indulge in two midday meals, Miss Prism paraphrases John Milton on the dangers of anarchy: ‘To partake of two luncheons in one day would not be liberty. It would be licence!’
Webster and his cast may have taken liberties with the text and their interpretation of it, but they have shown, once again, that Wilde’s ‘trivial play for serious people’ is as delightful as ever it was.
I recommend this video of Oscar Wilde Society Press Officer Darcy Sullivan in conversation with Wilde scholar Kate Hext and society president Gyles Brandreth after a screening of the production.