In the closing weeks of his St James’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest, in April 1895, in a desperate attempt to save it from the widening catastrophe resulting from Wilde’s suit for criminal libel against the Marquess of Queensberry, George Alexander chose to remove the dramatist’s name from the hoardings and the St James’s program itself. The calculated deceit involved in this suppression evidently had no substantial effect in reversing the strong ebb tide of dwindling audiences at the St James’s, and Alexander was forced to close the production after the performance on 8 May. Fortunately, after Wilde was released from prison two years later, in 1897, owing to the enterprising efforts of Leonard Smithers, the courageous London publisher who would bring out Wilde’s long poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol in 1898, Wilde was able to publish first editions of The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband, in 1899.
It is commonly believed that Wilde’s plays, and in particular The Importance of Being Earnest, were absent from the public stage for some time after his fall in 1895. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Michael Seeney has shown in From Bow Street to the Ritz, his enterprising study of Wilde’s theatrical career in the period beginning in 1895, the plays continued to be performed in the provinces, in Ireland, and even in London itself. Seeney documents productions of A Woman of No Importance appearing even while Wilde’s trials were going on or just after, in Bath and Birkenhead, and later in Halifax, Doncaster, and Gloucester, all in the month of May. Sarah Thorne’s company produced An Ideal Husband in Margate in June. Lewis Waller and H. H. Morrell’s London company revived An Ideal Husband at the Grand Theatre in London in July and again in September, at Morton’s Model Theatre. A. B. Tapping’s company began a four-month tour of The Importance beginning in early October, in Kidderminster, visiting other provincial cities and Cork and Limerick in Ireland as well, and by mid-December the company was back in suburban London, at the Metropole Theatre. On that same day, 16 December, Charles Hawtrey tried out a production of An Ideal Husband in London, at the Lyric. In February 1896 the Tapping company took The Importance to Waterford and Ipswich.[1]
And so on and on, for all four of the major plays, in a remarkably well-sustained effort on the part of almost two dozen companies performing in London, the provinces, and Ireland, up into 1908 (the end point of Seeney’s coverage), and presumably beyond. Seeney chose this terminal date as meaningful because it was on 1 December 1908 that a celebratory dinner was held at the Ritz Hotel in London to honor Robert Ross’s publication of the first edition of Wilde’s Collected Works and, not incidentally, Ross’s determined and productive efforts to redeem Wilde’s estate from bankruptcy.[2] The title of Seeney’s book captures the remarkable series of events that begin with Wilde’s trial at Bow Street and immediate imprisonment and end thirteen years later with the celebration of Ross’s successful efforts at the Ritz.
The question arises of what texts of Wilde’s plays were available to companies other than Alexander’s and Waller and Morell’s for use in their touring productions. Alexander, of course, continued to use his St James’s house text until the first edition of Wilde’s play became available, in 1899, and he could carve out of it a more up-to-date playing script. Waller and Morell, of course, had access to Haymarket scripts of An Ideal Husband and Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s previous production of A Woman of No Importance. As far as Lady Windermere’s Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest are concerned, in August 1896 Alexander had advertised the availability of provincial acting rights for those two plays, among others.[3] A. B. Tapping’s company evidently took advantage of Alexander’s offer of provincial touring company access at an early point by taking The Importance of Being Earnest on tour at the beginning of October 1895 and making it a thriving means of provincial entertainment. They visited the Theatre Royal in Kidderminster on 2 October and the New Alhambra in Stourbridge on the eighth of the month, and then progressed to theatres in Stafford and Walsall, continuing on to Ireland and visiting Cork, Limerick, and Waterford over the remainder of the month. Returning to England in November, they played in Blackpool, Folkstone, and Grimsby through that month. The text of Wilde’s last play obtained by the Tapping company from Alexander was doubtless his house text, based on the first St James’s production of February 1895, a text that Tapping’s company continued to use in performances through the new year of 1896, in Ireland on 27 January at the Theatre Royal in Limerick and again on 3 February at the Theatre Royal in Waterford, returning to England by 17 February to perform at the Lyceum in Ipswich. After a months-long interval, the Tapping company was active with The Importance again in February 1897, in Grimsby and Belfast, and once more at the beginning of March, at the Pier Pavilion in Hastings, reappearing in later years only infrequently.[4]
Before his death in 1900, Wilde’s efforts to revise and see through the press first editions of An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, published in 1899 and uniform with existing editions of Lady Windermere’s Fan and A Woman of No Importance, brought a measure of closure to his efforts to pass on his plays to posterity in some more proper literary form than the common acting editions then prevailing. One result of these efforts was that the publication of The Importance seems to have lent momentum to George Alexander’s efforts to recoup the losses resulting from the premature closing of the St James’s premiere production in spring 1895. Sensing fresh opportunity with the accession of a new monarch, King Edward VII, in 1901, Alexander reviewed his copy of the Smithers edition of The Importance, compared it closely with his St James’s house book for the 1895 production, and marked it up extensively as a basis for a new promptbook, while at the same time striking an agreement with the Samuel French company to supply them with a copy of his revised script for their proposed acting edition.[5]
And so, in October 1901, Alexander and his St James’s company embarked on a tour of Irish and provincial English theatres to try out a revised and redacted version of Wilde’s farcical comedy. Alexander’s intention was to test the waters in a variety of out-of-London locations to discover whether he could see his way clear to an eventual St James’s revival. He was careful to place advertisements in local newspapers in advance of an arrival. A typical example of this priming of a potential audience was the ad that appeared in the Belfast News-Letter on behalf of the Belfast Grand Opera House, on 18 November 1901: “Special Engagement of Mr. George Alexander and Complete Company, Scenery, and Effects. From the St. James’s Theatre, London.”[6] His first stop was the Court Theatre in Liverpool, on the twenty-eighth of October. Local newspaper reviewers were enthusiastic about the production of The Importance. The role of John Worthing “splendidly suited the lighter side of Mr. Alexander’s style,” said the critic for the Liverpool Echo, “and his rollicking spirits had full scope.”[7] Alexander and his company moved on, in early November, to Manchester, and then to Belfast, Dublin, and Nottingham, returning to suburban London in December, to the Coronet and the Kennington Theatre, while including a side trip to Brighton as well.[8]
Alexander must have found considerable encouragement in the critical response to his tour, along with the evident reactions of audiences. The newspaper critics in Manchester, for example, found much to praise in the performance of The Importance they witnessed at the Theatre Royal on 4 December, and the critic for the Guardian took the opportunity to offer a serious, substantive review of the play itself before turning to the performance of Alexander’s company. He thanked Alexander for the “generous enterprise” that brought Wilde’s play to Manchester. It is a brilliant play, he said, having “little in common” with other farces of the day, and yet it does not pretend to possess “the force or unction of comedy.” Its construction, although slight, is “exceedingly ingenious.” It is saved not only by its wit but by a “delightful extravagance of dramatic invention.” No description can do justice to its “ironic intention.” The author has achieved an “extraordinary feat” in maintaining such a constant artifice, for the play “never degenerates into nature.” It purposefully lacks “great comic effects”; rather, it is the “continual play of wit” and the “accumulation of ludicrous details” that come together in “a rare and delightful entertainment.” At its best the play reveals a “fine quality of invention and even of inspiration,” and there is a peculiar quality of “topsy-turvy gravity” that the reviewer found “inexpressibly amusing.” It is true enough, he acknowledged, that the author’s wit is “largely ornamental rather than contributory,” but all the same The Importance of Being Earnest is one of the “funniest” of plays. As for the performance of the St. James’s company, the play has given Alexander one of his very best parts. Especially noticeable was the “air of deference” difficult to describe, towards Lady Bracknell that characterized Alexander’s manner and tone, so well maintained through the play. The rest of the actors followed suit, and were “heartily applauded” by a moderate house. Implicitly admonishing playgoers who may have stayed away, the reviewer hoped that audiences who “care for the art of the theatre” will not allow “such fine and entertaining work” to die.[9]
Other reactions were similarly positive. The critic for the Irish Times, reviewing the performance at the Theatre Royal Dublin on 18 November, pronounced it “most acceptable.” Of course the play was completely farcical, he said, “despite its mincing title,” and Alexander in the central role of John Worthing entered into the farcical spirit “with thorough abandonment”—a justification for including this lighter fare along with the serious drama that showed the best side of the St James’s company.[10]
By December Alexander’s players had returned to London. There, the enthusiastic response to performances at the Coronet Theatre may have been decisive for Alexander. On opening night, 2 December, the Coronet, in Notting Hill, Bayswater, was the scene of a large gathering of social and literary London, said J. T. Grein, a Dutch theatrical manager and founder of the Independent Theatre a few years before. Throughout the tour, Alexander, following the example set by the title page of the 1899 Smithers edition, represented the dramatist in the program only indirectly, billing the play as “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People, by the author of Lady Windermere’s Fan.”[11] Grein resented this tactic on Alexander’s part, unaware that it had been Wilde himself, in preparing the Smithers edition for publication, who had told Smithers to use those exact words. Grein was also unaware that it was chiefly Alexander who had transformed a four-act play, of which Grein knew nothing, into a three-act work. Assuming that it was Wilde himself who had written a new three-act play for Alexander and the St James’s Theatre, Grein saw the work as delineating Wilde’s increasing personal troubles over the course of its preparation, and so falling into a kind of forced gaiety in the third act. And so this last act was not up to the quality of the first two, where, he explained, “the real, the probable, and the impossible, form a ménage à trois of rare felicity.”[12]
In sum, according to Barry Duncan, historian of the St. James’s Theatre, what Alexander experienced from the revival at the Coronet was “applause and no disturbance.”[13] And the critic for the Era, the authoritative journal of the theatrical profession, pronounced it “as fresh and piquant as if the piece had only just been written.” Each act concluded with “effusive” applause, he reported, and throughout the performance the audience responded with “burst after burst of laughter.”[14]
Emboldened by the enthusiastic critical and popular response to his touring company’s performances in a number of Irish and provincial cities and towns, and newly encouraged by the response of the local press and audience to his tryout at the Coronet and in Brighton as well, Alexander found it was time to try his luck with the metropolitan audience that devotedly patronized his St. James’s Theatre. The reviewer for the Era, who had seen and noticed the Coronet performances, remarked that the play was now being offered to a more sophisticated audience than the suburban one in Bayswater, able to appreciate even more fully and demonstratively the “deliciously absurd” speeches. Alexander’s Jack Worthing, a character that had never been played more successfully, said the Era reviewer, was notable especially for the “easy drollery” of the acting and the “entirely unforced humour” of the character. And he particularly liked the “quaint and distinct delivery” of Lyall Swete’s Canon Chasuble, an impersonation “unimpeachably smooth and funny.” As the Cecily, Lilian Braithwaite endowed the role with a “sweet simplicity and personal charm,” giving it a certain “serenity.” Mrs Thomas Laverton, as Miss Prism, played the governess in a manner “most natural and distinct”.[15]
William Archer wrote only a brief review of Alexander’s first revival, in The World, but covered some important ground. Archer found himself setting a high standard for a play that, he acknowledged, was “one of the most delightful pieces of nonsense to be seen on the modern stage.” And yet, he thought, the play is “a little too facile”; some added effort on Wilde’s part could have made it even better. The author was relying upon “mere scenic tricks” and “parallelisms” that could pretend to “no structural justification.” The result of this failure was that the characters begin to act “with deliberate rather than with unconscious absurdity.” For all that, the audience continued to laugh all the way through. Archer’s memory of the premiere performance in 1895, however, was vivid enough for him to miss the stellar abilities of Alan Aynesworth, the original Algernon Moncrieff, and Rose LeClercq, the original Lady Bracknell.[16]
Archer evidently commanded a distinct following among newspaper readers, but an even more formidable critic was the successor to Bernard Shaw at the Saturday Review. Max Beerbohm, who began there in 1898, enjoyed a freedom of expression comparable to that of his predecessor. In this instance, as in others, he took a long view of his subject. Having survived the test of time, in this case exactly seven years, Wilde’s farce had become a classic. Following the general diffidence among reviewers as to any mention of the author’s actual name, Max nevertheless insisted on wanting the play to be performed completely and exactly true to its original text. In the present case this failed to happen. Of course, Beerbohm was unaware that it was not the actors who were at fault in their omissions and imprecisions, but rather Alexander himself, as we have seen. Beerbohm seemed to know the play almost by heart, and so offered a critique of several of Miss Prism’s lines. About to go off on a walk with Canon Chasuble, she instructs Cecily to omit the chapter on the fall of the rupee in her reading of political economy because it is “somewhat too exciting,” instead of “somewhat too sensational.” In fact, Alexander substituted an entire phrase, “somewhat too exciting for a young girl.”[17] In another instance of regrettable lapse, in telling her remarkable story of how the baby ended up in a handbag and her recognition of the bag, in Act III, Miss Prism truncated the phrase “younger and happier days” to “younger day”’—again, the result of Alexander’s heavy-handed adjudication of Wilde’s script.
Beerbohm had more to say about Alexander’s treatment of the play, particularly its style and the method of delivery of lines. He carefully distinguishes between the “beautiful nonsense” of the play itself and the way Alexander’s company presented the work on the St James’s stage:
Throughout the dialogue is the horse-play of a distinguished intellect and a distinguished imagination—a horse-play among words and ideas, conducted with poetic dignity. What differentiates this farce from any other, and makes it funnier than any other, is the humorous contrast between its style and matter. To preserve its style fully, the dialogue must be spoken with grave unction. The sound and the sense of the words must be taken seriously, treated beautifully. If mimes rattle through the play and anyhow, they manage to obscure much of its style, and much, therefore, of its fun. They lower it towards the plane of ordinary farce.[18]
This, in sum, was Beerbohm’s uncomplimentary view of the treatment of Wilde’s play by Alexander and his company. His list of faults seemed almost endless. One last example involves the scene, among all others, that captured the imaginations of reviewers of the original production. In Act II, having planned the demise of his imaginary brother in Act I, John Worthing appears upstage, dressed in full mourning, and proceeds down center, eventually being recognized by Miss Prism and Canon Chasuble, who stand at either side. Worthing should make the slowest possible entrance, Beerbohm explains, so as to give the audience time to realize the truth of the situation, but as Alexander played the moment he “came bustling on at break-neck speed”—a nearly unforgivable lapse, which convicted Alexander, in Beerbohm’s view, of having a mistaken “theory of the play.” He should slow the entire play down, Beerbohm concluded, adding half an hour to the playing time, in order to do justice to Wilde’s exceptional farce.[19]
Unaccountably, Beerbohm failed to note that Alexander had substituted an entirely new ending for the one he had used in the original production, in which, in response to Lady Bracknell’s complaint that Jack was “displaying signs of triviality,” he replies that, on the contrary, he has just realized for the first time in his life “the Vital Importance of Being Earnest.”[20] Alexander’s newly contrived ending reads as follows:
Lady B.: I remember now that the General was called Ernest.
Gwen: Ernest! I felt from the first that you could have no other name.
Jack: Gwendoline, at last!
Chas: ( together) Laetitia, at last!
Prism: Frederick, at last!
Algy: Cecily, at last!
Gwen: My own Ernest.
(Tableau)
(Curtain)[21]
Reviewers of the 1902 St. James’s revival were evidently ready to welcome The Importance of Being Earnest back to the stage. All the same, an additional seven years would pass before Alexander ventured to mount the play again on home territory. This he did in 1909, opening this second revival on 30 November and managing to run it for no fewer than 316 performances. Many reviewers were present for the opening night or for performances soon after, including the critic for The Era, whose history with the play went back to the original production of 1895.
He had said in his original notice in The Era, on 16 February 1895, that a time would come when the play will seem as antiquated as Gilbert’s Engaged did at that present time. Such a time has not yet arrived, he points out, for on the opening night of Alexander’s present revival, “Every epigram, every paradox was received with just as uproarious outbursts of laughter as when they first fell on the ear of the listener.” Wilde’s trivial comedy, indeed, “did not show the slightest sign of age, and bore the test of revival better than more serious work.” The two central male characters, Jack and Algy, are portrayed by the same actors as in the original production: George Alexander and Allan Aynesworth, both of whom admirably preserve “the spirit of youth”. In the second act, when John Worthing arrives in deep mourning for his “phantom brother,” there is “a shout of laughter”. Algy’s “invincible impudence” in impersonating the nonexistent brother “keeps the fun going at high pressure,” and Aynesworth’s “unabashed coolness and suave diplomacy” were enacted “in the best spirit of drollery.” Stella Patrick Campbell as Gwendolen gave full point to “the sentimental aspirations of that gently-nurtured young woman,” and her “dark beauty” contrasted strongly with the fair loveliness of Rosalie Toller as Cecily, a role she played “with infinite charm.” Helen Rous as Lady Bracknell was “unimpeachable”; her “well-rounded and witty sentences” were delivered “with well-bred severity”. Moreover, the stage management and mounting of the play “were as perfect as possible,” and the garden at the manor house, Woolton, proved to be “a very pretty set, on which the eye dwelt with a great deal of pleasure.”[22]
The reviewer for the Illustrated London News also identified himself as one of a group of older playgoers who cherished memories of the 1895 premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest. One specific memory of his, he said, is of the moment in which Alexander “made his appearance in all the sombre trappings of deep mourning.” That constituted “a stroke of genius,” in his opinion, and it made the fortune of the play, which “had already kept its audience in transports of delight by its high spirits and its constant sallies of wit”. Paradoxical epigrams of the kind that Oscar Wilde affected no longer have the vogue they enjoyed in the dramatist’s generation; “we want something more than the obverse of a commonplace to make us laugh in the theatre nowadays.” Yet, on the whole, time has dealt lightly with Wilde’s farce, and the sheer fun of this happiest of all his inventions “still gets as well as ever across the footlights,” even though the dialogue, brilliant as it is, “has the air of being a little out of fashion.” And so this second revival of Alexander’s is very welcome, the reviewer concluded, especially since Alexander himself plays the “pseudo-Ernest” and “rattles off his speeches with all his own sly and smirking humour.” Alexander is fortunate in having Allan Aynesworth opposite him once again as his “unscrupulous and treacherous friend.” As for the production itself, the stage management of the play “has the precision of fourteen years ago.”[23]
Continuing his service as the critic for the journal familiarly called The Saturday, Max Beerbohm had apparently left behind his earlier concern with accuracy of text, but he retained as always his long view of the play and his appreciation for its larger context. As a result, the piece he published in 1909 is not so much a review of the play itself as a full-scale if brief critical essay examining the source of the indelible freshness its author had introduced into it from the very first. It benefits greatly from comparison with Wilde’s three social comedies, in Beerbohm’s view, because of the stale mechanism that drives those other works. If Wilde had only lived longer, Beerbohm believes, he would ultimately have discovered his own form for comedy, and “would have written serious comedies as perdurable as his one great farce.” His last play, and his greatest, demonstrates, in contrast, “a perfect fusion of manner and form”—not so much from its wit, but from its “ever-fanciful and inventive humour, irradiating every scene.” Beerbohm offers many examples of this distinguished achievement. To choose just one instance, he cites Canon Chasuble’s response in Act II to Jack’s explanation that his dead brother expressed a wish to be buried in Paris: “I fear that hardly points to any very serious state of mind at the last.” Beerbohm’s commentary on Alexander’s revival itself is brief, almost an afterthought. Noting that the central male roles of Jack and Algy are performed once more, as in the original production, by Alexander and Aynesworth, he considers the fact a “solemn thought.” Two young actresses, Stella Patrick Campbell and Rosalie Toller, were “charming,” he found, as Gwendolen and Cecily.[24]
Focusing on this latter-day repetition of the central male roles, H. Hamilton Fyfe, former editor of the Daily Mirror and now writing for The World, found that Aynesworth had aged in the fourteen years that had passed since he had first played Algernon Moncrieff, whereas, despite the passing of time, Alexander enacted the entrance in mourning in Act II “with all the old enjoyment and effect.” While the wit has become “tarnished,” and the age of the inverted aphorism “has passed away,” the humor of Wilde’s work, he concluded, “is as irresistible as ever.”[25]
The central place of the theatre in the cultural life of the time is well indicated by the existence of more than one periodical devoted entirely to dramatic art (along with one that focussed on the stage and the turf: the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News). The critic for The Stage, among the more knowledgeable and sophisticated of theatre journalists, could describe Alexander’s acting as John Worthing in precise, insightful words:
Mr Alexander plays with that plausibility which is the fine flower of farce-acting. His ease is delightful, the finish of his acting admirable. On Tuesday his scenes with Mr Allan Aynesworth in the second act, where John Worthing is obliged, after his parade of grief, to receive the impudent Algernon in the name of Ernest, very much alive, went with the fully caustic humour that underlies them.[26]
Evidently an experienced witness of farce and farcical comedy and the acting that on occasion can happily accompany it, this reviewer is able to combine the details of his description of Alexander’s acting with a full understanding of how the actor’s performance enhances the rare humor infused into the play by the dramatist himself. It is a fine example of theatrical criticism at its best.
* * *
Two more productions of Wilde’s best-known play, now well on its way toward classic status, occurred in later years of Alexander’s tenure at the St James’s Theatre, in 1911 and in 1913. Evidently, Alexander had reached a point in his illustrious career at which he felt he could no longer sustain the role of the twenty-nine-year-old John Worthing (even though by 1911 he had raised the age of the character to thirty-four). The reviewer for The Stage observed the change in the casting of the two lead men’s roles, and of the production that opened on 26 June 1911 he had nothing but good to say. John Worthing in this production is impersonated by A. Hamilton Revelle, “an admirable actor” well known to the reviewer, who had praised him in earlier times. Expectedly, Revelle was “more youthful in appearance”; he was also “less quiet and subdued than Sir George” had been in the role (Alexander had recently been knighted by King Edward), and Revelle makes the character “very lively and exuberant, almost hysterical and over-wrought.” Now a character who is “exultant in the successful carrying out of his double life,” he is very well matched by the actor new to the role of Algernon Moncrieff, A. E. Matthews, who plays the part in “the most vivacious and mischievously gleeful” way. As Cecily Cardew, Gladys Cooper is transformed into “a simple, innocent little ingénue, whose naïve speeches are uttered without any suspicion of dissimulation.” As for Dorothy Green’s enactment of Gwendolen Fairfax, she succeeds in endowing her character “with the necessary counterpoise of knowing where her bread is buttered, and her performance also is successful.” The critic points out that the play is announced for only a limited number of performances, but he would not be surprised if its considerable attractions end up leading to an extended run.[27]
Another limited run of the play at the St James’s occurred in 1913, this time for even fewer performances, beginning on 15 February—”in the presence of a delighted audience,” said the critic for The Era. The production once again proved “fresh and sparkling, with its brilliant epigrams and well-directed shafts of wit.” Gerald Ames as John Worthing “captured the spirit of the role,” acting “with abundant verve and a keen perception of the humorous possibilities of the role.” No better exponent could be desired for the role of Algy than A. E. Mathews, and the style he adopted was “perfectly suited to the character.” Alexander was fortunate in bringing Helen Rous back as Lady Bracknell. Her “emphatically expressed sentiments of the high-tone and haughty aristocrat were keenly relished by the audience.” Rosalie Toller, resuming her previous role, still looks the part of the eighteen-year-old Cecily, and “her girlish grace and impulsiveness are just as perfectly assumed as her display of indignation in the pretty quarrel with Gwendolen,” the latter character so “daintily played” by Miss Dorothy Fane, who was especially commendable for the delivery of her lines. The scenes, mounted by James Cullen, were once more “beyond praise.”[28]
The reviewer for The Stage was no less enthusiastic. Looking back to the original production of eighteen years before, he found that the play was still the “brilliant satirical farce” originally written by Oscar Wilde. “Even now” its “sparkling humour and its epigrammatic wisdom” remain irresistible. Its fun is “as fresh as ever,” its satire and cynicism “just as true.” It must be allowed that its female characters scarcely measure up “as new creations” in this current age of “an unusually strong Feminist movement,” but they do not exceed the “borderline of exaggeration.” The one requirement the play still makes is that it be well acted. While not as strongly performed as before, the critic believed, every role was nevertheless played “with good artistic sense and effect.” E. Vivian Reynolds, the St James’s stage manager, followed the example set by the creator of the original Canon Chasuble, the earlier stage manager H. H. Vincent, and brought “ripe experience” to the part, making that worthy “a very real personage.” The Act II tea scene was played by both young ladies with “abundant spirit and skill.” Helen Rous as Lady Bracknell offered a “delightful character study of the grande dame,” and the writer singled her out for her “splendid diction,” which “gives full value to the many inverted aphorisms” integrated into the role by the author. For her part, Alice Beet as Miss Prism scored all points and avoided “making the character too sour or hard.”[29]
The advertisement accompanying the review in the Illustrated London News informed audiences that the play was to be available only “for a limited number of performances.” The critic for the periodical explained what he realized was George Alexander’s current strategy in reviving Wilde’s play. It had become his “trump card,” ready to mount whenever he encountered a “momentary difficulty.” The present revival would be on only while he rehearsed A. E. W. Mason’s next offering. Of course, this “happiest and liveliest of all Oscar Wilde’s stage-works” was so reliable, and so much an audience favorite, that in the case of a former revival of it, intended to be no more than “a stopgap,” it “lasted eleven months.” Whenever it was performed, the reviewer noted, Alexander had a ready crew of players prepared to take it on. The result was that “once more at the St. James’s can be heard such a succession of peals of laughter that only playgoers with keen ears will catch all of the author’s jests.”[30]
Having relied on the interim dependability of Wilde’s sturdy farce, Alexander proceeded to mount Mason’s play, Open Windows, beginning on 11 March, having closed Wilde’s after its last performance on the seventh of the month.[31] It had run for some eighty-eight performances, justifying once again the St James’s actor-manager’s proven strategy and indicating the long-term place Wilde’s play enjoyed in the repertory of Alexander’s theatre. All the same, the next production of The Importance of Being Earnest to be mounted in the West End occurred only in 1923, at the Haymarket, produced by Allan Aynesworth, the original Algernon Moncrieff. And the next revival after that, another seven years later, would be Nigel Playfair’s much praised black-and-white production at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in 1930, with John Gielgud as John Worthing.[32]
Meanwhile, Alexander’s long and celebrated tenure at the St James’s had drawn to an end. He died on 16 March 1918, a much admired and respected actor and manager and a prominent public figure as well. History would associate his name most especially with the first productions of two plays by Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), but his reputation during the 1890s and up through the period of the Great War (as it was then called) exceeded any connections with particular dramatists and finally came to stand, along with that of a few other actor-producers such as Henry Irving, as defining the character of the West End theatre of that day.[33]
- Seeney, From Bow Street to the Ritz, 122-3. ↵
- Seeney, From Bow Street to the Ritz, Intro., 11. ↵
- Seeney, From Bow Street to the Ritz, 58. ↵
- Seeney, From Bow Street to the Ritz, 123, 126-7. ↵
- See the discussion of Alexander’s revisions in The Importance of Being Earnest in the Oxford Complete Works of Wilde, ed. Joseph Donohue, Plays 3, 659-67, 691-700. ↵
- Belfast News-Letter, 1. ↵
- Liverpool Echo, 31 October 1901, 4. ↵
- Seeney, From Bow Street to the Ritz, 134-5. ↵
- Manchester Guardian, 5 November 1901, 6. ↵
- "Theatre Royal: Mr George Alexander in ‘The Importance of Being Earnest," Irish Times, 22 Nov. 1901, 5. ↵
- St. James’s Theatre program, 7 Jan. 1902, Harvard Theatre Collection. ↵
- J. T. Grein, signed review, Sunday Times, 8 Dec. 1901, reprinted in Karl Beckson, Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), 238. ↵
- Barry Duncan, The St. James’s Theatre: Its Strange & Complete History 1835-1957 (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1964), 262. ↵
- ”George Alexander at the Coronet,” Era, 7 Dec. 1901. ↵
- The Era, 11 January 1902, 12. ↵
- The World, 15 January 1902, 26. ↵
- Alexander’s copy of the Smithers first edition, Beinecke Rare Books Library, Yale University, cited in Donohue, ed., The Importance of Being Earnest, Complete Works of Wilde, Plays 3, 658. ↵
- "Max” [Beerbohm], Saturday Review, 18 January 1902. ↵
- Saturday Review, 18 January 1902, reprinted in Max Beerbohm, Around Theatres (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953), 188-91. ↵
- Thus in the first edition (London: Leonard Smithers, 1899), 132. ↵
- Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (London: Samuel French, [1903]), 52. (Gwendolen’s name is spelled “Gwendoline” throughout.) The text is based on the script provided by George Alexander; see the discussion in Donohue, ed., The Importance of Being Earnest, Complete Works of Wilde, Plays 3, 682-3. Alexander’s staging of the 1902 revival is recorded in his personal copy of the Smithers first edition, now in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. ↵
- The Era, 4 December 1909, 17. ↵
- Illustrated London News, 11 December 1909, 854. ↵
- "A Classic Farce,” Saturday Review, 11 December 1909, 726. ↵
- H. Hamilton Fyfe, “The Theatre,” The World, 7 December 1909, 983. ↵
- The Stage, 2 December 1909, 18. ↵
- The Stage, 29 June 1911, 19. In fact, the play ran for just under a month, for a total of twenty-seven performances (Wearing, The London Stage 1910-1919, 11.213). ↵
- The Era, 22 February 1913, 19. ↵
- The Stage, 20 February 1913, 25. ↵
- Illustrated London News, 22 February 1913, 230. ↵
- Wearing, The London Stage 1910-1919, 13.43, 13.68. ↵
- Wearing, The London Stage 1920-1929, 23.268; Wearing, The London Stage 1930-1939, 30.251. See the accounts of these two productions in subsequent chapters below. ↵
- See Mason, Alexander & the St James’ Theatre, 224 and passim. ↵