21 June 2011: Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
21 June 2011: Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Live in HD broadcast, Roundabout Theatre Company at the American Airlines Theatre, New York City. Brian Bedford, director and as Lady Bracknell. Seen at the Amherst Cinema, Amherst, Massachusetts
“Live” in the sense that this film is of a live performance, broadcast on four separate dates for multiple cinemas across the nation (and, for all I know, beyond as well). The film had also been edited for delayed cinematic presentation: the transition between Act II and Act III, which involves a change of setting, was done instantly, with no intermission, unlike that between Acts I and II.
This production has had a lot of publicity, especially for the fact of Brian Bedford playing Lady Bracknell as well as directing. We were prepared to enjoy ourselves. And through the first act we did, even though the Gwendolen, Sara Topham, seemed to be using the upper register of her voice quite a lot and even though the actors tended to shout and not just to project. But as the play progressed into Act II, we sensed some vague disappointment. We began to sense a certain being played down to in the quality of the performance. And gradually we realized that this production is aimed point blank at what is called “the Broadway audience.” It is an audience, evidently, that, much like the former president of the United States, “doesn’t do nuance.” Later (I am writing this review on 25 June) I asked a good friend of mine whom I had seen among the audience how he liked it. He hesitated, and then said, “It all seemed to be overdone.” He was right. Apparently this is what it takes now to succeed on Broadway: make it all unmistakably obvious. And be careful not to overestimate the intelligence of the audience.
An example of this overdressed playing down was an alteration of a line of Miss Prism’s in Act II. Jack is trying to book a time with Canon Chasuble to be baptized. Chasuble says he has “a case of twins” to baptize at 5:00 that afternoon, the latest offspring of Jenkins, a very hard-working man (nobody laughed at that). Miss Prism comments that she has often had to speak to the working-class people on the estate about this (she means, about producing so many children), “but they don’t seem to know what thrift is.” The wittiness of the line is in the use of “thrift” to mean an economizing of an unusual kind, even more basic than being careful about money. Bedford (I presume he is the one who decided on the change) altered the word to “restraint,” depriving it of any hint of wit or humor.
And he even went so far as to interpolate a line of his own invention. In Act III, Jack is on the library ladder, a volume of the Army lists in hand, having just determined that his name is, like that of his father, “Ernest John.” As he descends from the ladder he suddenly cries out, “A wild hope dawns across my life!” I know the text of this play very well, if I may say so, and no such line appears in that text. What exactly Brian Bedf