14 May 2006: Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
14 May 2006: Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Matinee. Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, New York. Sir Peter Hall’s Bath Theatre Royal production. Closing performance. Opened at BAM 18 April. Running time 2 hrs 30 mins. Three-act text slightly cut.
Hilton Als wrote a very strange review of this production for the New Yorker, in which he said that Hall neither added nor took anything away from this play; it was “direction by automatic pilot.” Whatever Als might have meant by this obscure remark, he failed to describe Hall’s efforts, almost entirely successful, to bring out the farcical spirit of the play. Wilde himself explained, in a letter to the actor-manager George Alexander, that it should “go like a pistol shot.” The action is well paced, with no longueurs whatever. I sense there were small cuts here and there, markers of Hall’s intention to maintain a swift pace. At the same time he doesn’t slight the remarkably bright, brilliant dialogue that as much as anything else makes the play what it is. He has trained his actors in the art of building up to a witty verbal climax, as in Algy’s comment on Mary Farquhar flirting with her husband across the dinner table: “ . . . and that sort of thing is enormously on the increase. It looks so bad. It is like washing one’s clean linen in public.” There is a delicious sense of anticipation and delay in Wilde’s adding “It looks so bad,” so that the punch line, when it comes, is all the funnier, and enhanced even more by the inversion in “clean.”
But of course the play is far more than an amalgamation of witty observations on the manners and mores of contemporary society. No need here to review the crafty strategy of an action that serves to bring an ostensible outsider into the sheltering arms of a socially correct family via a slightly incestuous marriage to a first cousin. Suffice it to say that, over a hundred years later, the writing is still as fresh as the day the play opened (Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1895), and the action plays as surely and as satisfyingly.
Back in February of this year I was asked to supply a list of questions for Peter Hall to answer. I did so, and among them were questions about the genre of the play. Farce? farcical comedy? or an amalgam of some kind? (The answers, along with the questions, were published on the BAM website.) Hall pretended to be impatient with such formulations and insisted that each and every successful play is a unique creation that must be taken on its own. In his program note he calls the play “a completely original farce” in one paragraph and in the next says “it defies category” and in fact is a “masterpiece which heralds the coming of surrealism.” This last observation seems to me pretentious nonsense, as is his claim that the characters in the play use wittiness to cover up their true feelings — “an internal emotional reality.” He goes on to end the note by quoting Pinter’s famous observation that speech “is a constant stratagem to cover