Surveying the mounting of productions of The Importance of Being Earnest and the
Surveying the mounting of productions of The Importance of Being Earnest and the writing of critical books and essays on the play is the complex goal of the present work. Fortunately, the text of Wilde’s three-act play has proved remarkably stable over the long period down to the present day: producers, actors, critics, and scholars are all likely to be engaging with the same three-act work. (Ironically, this is true partly because of a long-term lack of knowledge or even awareness of the existence of the four-act play and, until the last quarter-century, the lack of availability of a dependable four-act script.) More importantly, the audience for a performance of Wilde’s play and the readership of a published text enjoy a significant degree of overlapping interest, especially in the case of a play as wonderfully readable as this one. And the long tradition of production has benefited from the fact that Wilde’s last and most famous play has never been out of print since first published the year before his death; and it shows no sign of decline. A sizable segment of the population has grown up with it and passed it on to the next generation, who read it, see productions of it, and eventually find they have unintentionally committed significant passages to memory.
An example of this happy infiltration of Wilde’s play into western culture may be found in an entry in Robert Tanitch’s survey of British productions, Oscar Wilde on Stage and Screen. Tanitch recounts that, during an otherwise undistinguished production of the play at the Old Vic, London, in 1959, the actress playing Lady Bracknell had trouble remembering her lines—whereupon the audience took over the job of prompting her, to the mutual delight of players and auditors.[1] Even by 1923, the date of a much welcomed but extensively criticized revival (see below), one reviewer commented that, for senior members of the audience, “it has not the chance of coming as either a novelty or a surprise,” and indeed its “more daring jeux d’esprit we know off by heart.”[2]
Given the remarkable circulation of Wilde’s play in these ways over a century and more, it would be surprising if the ideas generated by production after production and the ideas broached by a long series of critical writings had not inevitably cross-fertilized these fields of activity, to their mutual benefit. We may best see this happening by scrutinizing reviews of selected, high-profile productions and comparing them with emerging trends in contemporary Wildean criticism. Despite the early paucity of critical approaches, some productive sense of the lay of the land appeared to be forthcoming. For example, in this respect, the 1950s prove to be an interesting time of transition. In this post-war period, fresh theatrical ideas are emerging alongside scholarship that is itself taking original or unorthodox perspectives on newly discovered texts. Scholars and critics alike begin to find different, insightful ways of understanding thei