31 December 2006: The Importance of Being Earnest
Matinee. American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ridiculusmus Company. The play devised, edited, and adapted by David Woods, Jon Haynes, and Jude Kelly. Directed by Jude Kelly. Performed by David Woods and Jon Haynes. First performance 21 December 2006.
This delightful, high camp version of Wilde’s classic farce is subtitled, in the program, “A trivial comedy performed by two Serious People.” They don’t say, as Wilde’s original subtitle does, whether the play is ‘for Serious People’ or some other audience. Yet it surely must be for an audience familiar enough with the original play to follow and understand it while it is being camped up unmercifully — and willing to be entertained by the camping up as well. The camping is done by the two actors, David Woods and Jon Haynes, who together act all the parts, aided and abetted in this fiendish ostensible destruction of a masterpiece by Jude Kelly, the director and collaborator with Haynes and Woods in this entirely serious rendering of Wilde’s trivial comedy.
If you’re going to camp something up, you must first read W. S. Gilbert’s advice to the players of his inspired farce Engaged (on which The Importance of Being Earnest is, in part, based). The actors must seem entirely oblivious to the comedy they are creating and the humor they are generating. The two “Serious People” (note the capital letters), Woods and Haynes, are no less than maniacally serious, equally willing to let the action stop dead while they walk offstage to change a costume or to carry on with breakneck speed in order to keep up the frantic pace of a critically important scene. In fact, the pace of the performance overall becomes gradually but unerringly faster, as if the production were in a protracted but ever more desperate race against time, ever fearful of some Farcical Nemesis lurking in the cosmic surround.
Evidently, Haynes and Woods, and Kelly too, have taken such lessons as Gilbert prescribes to heart, and to head, and have decided that doing things by half-measures must be ruled out from the start. This is camp with a mission, treating its subject (Wilde’s play) with colossal sangfroid, as if it were beneath aesthetic contempt, while simultaneously lavishing on it the kind of veneration that comes only from actors whose secret desire since childhood has been to play all the parts in The Importance of Being Earnest—especially the female parts. (Who among us has never longed to play that moment when Lady Bracknell, who, as Gwendolen says, has a habit of coming back suddenly into a room, comes suddenly back into the room where Jack is busy proposing and cries out, in stentorian tones, “Mr. Worthing! Rise, sir, from that semi-recumbent posture. It is most indecorous.”?)
How do you camp up The Importance of Being Earnest? I cannot count the ways, but here are some handy examples. Lady Bracknell’s Act I entrance is accompanied by music from Wagner’s “Ride of the V