Oscar Wilde said the philosophy of The Importance of Being Earnest is that ‘’we should treat all the trivial things of life seriously and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied artificiality.” The play, a brilliant mixture of elegant sophistication and preposterous nonsense, is the wittiest comedy in the English language.
There isn’t a topic Oscar doesn’t touch: social etiquette, politics, music, servants, celibacy, romantic love, proposals, marriage, parenthood, unmarried mothers, abandoned babies, the three volume novel, girls’ diaries, education, Germans, Australians, baptism, death and mourning.
The surprise casting is David Suchet as Lady Bracknell. He is not the first. There have been other actors who have played Lady Bracknell, including William Hutt in Stratford, Ontario, Bette Bourne on tour (who fooled the audience completely; they having no idea he was a man), Brian Bedford in New York, and Geoffrey Rush in Melbourne. There was even talk of Stephen Fry playing her
Every actor has to compete with the memory of Edith Evans and her celebrated and much imitated upward inflection on A HANDBAAAG! Her performances is preserved in Anthony Asquith’s 1952 film version with its incomparable cast – Michael Redgrave, Michael Denison, Joan Greenwood, Dorothy Tutin, Margaret Rutherford and Miles Malleson – all of them giving definitive performances.
Suchet is a formidable manly-female gorgon, an utterly implacable, mercenary snob, and quite unnerving when opening a notebook during an interview to find out whether a young man would be an eligible husband and quickly finding he would not be eligible at all: “To be born, or at any rate bred in a handbag, whether it has handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life, which remind one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.”
Adrian Noble’s enjoyable but over-emphatic production is not afraid to be totally artificial and he encourages the cast to play up to the audience. The actors deliver the epigrams and witticism with exemplary clarity.