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  • The Importance of Being Earnest
  • Felicia J. Ruf
The Importance of Being Earnest. By Oscar Wilde. Directed by Brian Bedford. Roundabout Theatre Company. The American Airlines Theatre, New York City. 17 December 2010.

Immediately after Oscar Wilde's death in 1900, psychics and impersonators tried to summon back the Irishman's spirit. The Roundabout Theatre Company's production of The Importance of Being Earnest (itself reincarnated from the Stratford Shakespeare Festival's 2009 season) faithfully and successfully channeled Wilde and the target of his humor—Victorian morality, fin-de-siècle fashion, and English manners. While the 1895 production at London's St. James's Theatre held an elegant mirror up to audience members, who were invited to laugh at fashionably attired characters not unlike themselves, the 2010 incarnation managed to elicit laughter from jeans-clad, texting-savvy spectators. Wilde's pitch-perfect dialogue and visually nuanced farce disarmed and engaged accidental tourists and Wilde aficionados alike through Brian Bedford's "earnest" rendering.

With perhaps a nod to nineteenth-century theatrical tradition, Bedford served less as a visionary director than as an actor-manager. However, unlike the first producer of Earnest, George Alexander, who took the lead role of Jack Worthing, Bedford inserted himself into a noteworthy lineage of grande dames that includes such legends as Rose Leclerq (the original Lady Bracknell), Dame Edith Evans, and Dame Judi Dench by assuming the now-famous dowager role. Bedford majestically entering from upstage left [End Page 462] dressed in elegant red satin that ballooned at the shoulder, replete with lace gloves and velvet purse, might have suggested drag performance; however, the actor offered no hint of gender-bending self-consciousness. Instead, he genuinely embodied the role, assuming the haughty demeanor of a woman who has clawed her way into society and means to stay there. From a chair, Bedford exerted maternal, near directorial authority when grilling Worthing as to whether he is a worthy match for her daughter Gwendolyn, and also later, when unmasking Prism, whose carelessness with a manuscript, handbag, and baby caused the disgraced nanny to go into hiding disguised as a governess.


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Brian Bedford (Lady Bracknell) and Charlotte Parry (Cecily) in The Importance of Being Earnest. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

The seriousness with which Bedford approached his performance, as well as his stewardship of the creative team, successfully unleashed the vibrancy, style, and life in Wilde's 115-year-old play—a satire steeped in a critique of period-specific class—dated even in the wake of a royal wedding. That Bedford and his cast delivered such a well-tuned verbal and visual farce rested in large part on their fastidious concern for production details, down to the lace tablecloths and silver chargers. From the comportment of the butlers to the frill on each parasol, the production's nearly antiquarian concern for visual nuance evoked an elegance that verged on the "utterly utter." Breath-taking sets and decorous Victorian fashions designed by Desmond Heeley were worthy of young Wilde, the apostle of aestheticism, who spread the doctrine of interior design and fashion reform during his North American lecture tour. Heeley's mise en scène was visually sumptuous and theatrically suggestive yet evocative of a real space, which supported the actors who inhabited this peculiar though historically specific milieu. Footlights provided a constant nineteenth-century stage frame, as did the wing and borders in the garden scene that were further decorated with pink and yellow roses on climbing vines, lace tablecloths, and exquisite lawn furniture.

While Wilde's comedy may be fueled by an exaggerated sensibility bordering on camp, the actors engaged the dialogue and physical humor, sparring over cucumber sandwiches and a particular cigarette case, for example, with a delicate mixture of refinement and fearlessness. While Wilde surely hoped to provoke laughter, his farce demands complete gravity and formality in performance, perhaps best affected in Dana Ivey's understated yet somehow scene-stealing Miss Prism, particularly as she hid behind her prim schoolmarm persona only to flirt youthfully with the awkwardly gallant Paxton Whitehead's Reverend Chausable. Yet the more [End Page 463] famously funny scenes elicited amusement, in part...

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