The Importance of Being Earnest

In repertory with "Six Characters in Search of an Author" at the Wilbur.

There is really no red-hot need for another production of Oscar Wilde's "trivial comedy for serious people," especially one by an American company not specifically equipped to deal with it. The performance on records with John Gielgud and the movie with Michael Redgrave are both extant, and each would be definitive if the other did not exist. If anybody has managed to attain to the age of reason without having seen or heard or read Earnest, a visit to the local performance would not be a bad idea, simply because Wilde's masterpiece is too good to miss. But the rest of us would do just as well to remain content with our memories, because Repertory Boston is not distinguishing itself in its current production.

Style, style is the one thing needful for Earnest, and the Rep's actors can provide it only intermittently. In this most artificial of comedies the actors must look and sound as if they lived in the world of the play, not as if they were assuming certain mannerisms as they came out of the wings. They must give the impression that elaborate epigrams and elegant pseudo-nonsense are as natural to them as "Please pass the ketchup" and "Aw, go---yourself" are to us. Any gesture or inflection that seems as if it is there for its own sake, or for the sake of the laugh it creates, or in a self-conscious attempt at style, or because the actor cannot think of anything better, or because a bit of the actor himself emerges when he is not looking--is wrong. Extravagance there must be, to match Wilde's extravagance, but it must appear to be the extravagance of the character, not of the actor.

This is not a counsel of perfection or a bit of neo-Renaissance decorum-mongering. Style is attainable (though God knows how), and its absence arouses a dissatisfaction that, in this production, frequently counterbalances and sometimes overbalances the lacquered perfection of the script.

Earnest is a comedy of manners--not a duplication but certainly a parody of the manners of Society in the English 1890's. Its characters are frequently rude on purpose, never by accident; they often exhibit bad manners, but it is impossible to conceive of their having no manners--unless, evidently, you are Stephen Aaron, who directed this production. Mr. Aaron: a gentleman never sits while a lady is standing, especially if the lady is a Lady, and no less if "she is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair." Moreover, a fashionable young man of the Wildean haut monde would never dream of endangering the seat of his immaculate trousers by sitting on the floor. These are minor matters, but they indicate that the nicely calibrated judgment and control that Mr. Aaron exercised over Six Characters is missing here. Some of his bits of business and blocking are just right, but some are slightly uncomfortable. And he has failed to drill his actors successfully in the cultivation of the impeccable English accents that are necessary in a comedy of English manners.

Things begin to look up considerably in the second of the play's three acts, however, when a young lady named Frances West makes her appearance. Having broken her leg during a performance of Six Characters, she is currently appearing in a wheelchair, but her scenes have been smoothly reblocked to accommodate her. Her Cecily has the proper air of bland but strong-minded ingenuousness; her accent is perfect, and if her voice did not sometimes become unnecessarily shrill, she would be thoroughly splendid.

Nothing of the sort can be said for anyone else in the cast, though John Lasell as Jack and Wendell Clark as Algy do some nice things after they have gotten over their first-act stiffness. Mr. Lasell has no sense of Jack's earnestness, his utterly sincere hypocrisy, his damnable stuffiness; Mr. Clark copes somewhat better with Algy, but cannot quite hit off his incorrigibly cheeky lightmindedness. As a result, they appear as a set of almost interchangeably cheerful young men. Gretchen Kanne misses the hothouse bloom of Gwendolyn, who exists in and through Society like an elegant bacterium in its nutrient broth. (In the midst of an ineffably decorous cat-fight, Gwendolyn accepts a cup of tea from her rival with the aside, "Detestable girl! But I require tea!") (italics mine).

The middle-aged characters fare considerably less well, because Repertory Boston does not seem to have engaged any middle-aged actors. Universal versatility in an acting company is a splendid aim, perhaps the true goal of repertory, but it is dangerous to count on it where it does not exist.

Webster Lithgow, whose arrangement of the bare stage for Six Characters was unobtrusively correct and atmospherically grubby, has under-estimated the need for Victorian naturalism in the settings for Earnest, which should never be designed by anyone but Cecil Beaton. The play is very carefully related to its background in life--Wilde even knows the address of John Worthing's town house. (Fen Lasell's formidable costumes are much more in the vein, because they appear impeccably "period.")

If the Rep's performance is even palely entertaining, and it is, homage should be directed to the feet of Oscar Fingall O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, who wrote the thing in the first place, using a conventional mistaken-identity farce as a platform from which to mount a deadpan, deadly, beautifully epigrammatic attack on the hypocrisy of a society which was soon, hypocritically, to cast him out.