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 their subject, even as theatrical producers and major actors are discovering new energy for untried approaches to a classic play. The next forty years will see an unprecedented outflow of critical articles and books, marked indelibly by the impress of extraordinary changes in society, down to the end of the century. Considerable gains, along with inevitable losses, will characterize the stage productions of Wilde’s play during this same time. Balanced selectivity should enable us to construct a meaningful profile of the fortunes of a play about which its author had said, with unaccustomed modesty, in his offer letter of 1894 to George Alexander, “Well, I think an amusing thing with lots of fun and wit might be made.”[3]
Meanwhile, the earlier period, from the time of the publication of Robert Ross’s collected edition, in 1908, up to 1930 produced a small but increasing number of productions and works of criticism that justify detailed attention. Even before this time, biographical writing about Oscar Wilde, initially only small-scale, began even while he was alive and since then has never ceased, remaining a fascinating subject for authors and readers alike. Critical studies of Wilde, on the other hand, were very slow to begin, apart from reviews of productions and, as we have seen, of important publications of his works.
One of the first books of collected reviews and essays stemming from them was Charles E. Montague’s Dramatic Values, a collection based on his theatre reviews for the Manchester Guardian, published in 1911.[4] In his chapter on Wilde’s major comedies Montague finds the first three not fully satisfactory, although An Ideal Husband is “so drenched in comedy that it cannot but keep an audience laughing”; but it is a comedy accompanied by some perplexity, generating “an uneasy sense of something alien to the spectator’s blood.” Montague’s no-nonsense approach keeps close watch on relative “dramatic values.” The first three comedies were mere specks on the excellence of the final piece, The Importance of Being Earnest, he says. To be sure, it contains “Gilbertian humours of simple inversion,” and some of its characters—”the parson, the governess, the she-dragon from Debrett”—are “old stage dummies.” All the same, there is much greater coherence in this, Wilde’s last comedy. To put it in terms of French theatrical slang, “the mots d’esprit have become mots de situation also, and, to some extent, mots de caractère too.” Verbal things glitter but derive value also from “where they are placed in the play” and often “give value by making some one’s mood or character divertingly apparent.”[5] Bernard Shaw, Montague observes, contends that the play wastes your time for not touching you as well as amusing you.[6] And yet it is like bread, which has worth in itself; it may also “conduce to Christian charity and brotherhood,” and yet bread and laughter are both good in themselves. The early conversation between Jack and Algernon amounts to “veracious social portraiture.” Fifteen years ago one frequently encountered this special “vein of chaff, a special blend of the knowing and the infantine, a kind of cynic simplicism,” Montague explains. Wilde’s play documents this phenomenon for later times.
Some people allege the presence of an oversupply of “mere stock farcical mechanics” in the play, Montague goes on, but it is not easy to tell when fun is mechanical and when it is not. Great makers of fun such as Trinculo, Sganarelle, Bob Acres, and Tony Lumpkin[7] could be accused of mechanical fun. Wilde’s use of such fun in his play is “the work of a comic genius.” The most memorable example is Jack’s entrance in deep mourning for the death of a fantastical brother whom he only pretends to have lost, in the garden of the house in which his friend at that very moment is impersonating that fictitious brother. To a knowing audience, the first sight of Jack in those black clothes is “convulsively funny.” Not heard, only seen, the moment has a precise richness, a gift of “scenic or spectacular imagination” that serves to distinguish a true dramatist from other writers.[8]
Another of such early critical studies was written by the journalist, children’s author, and professional writer Arthur Ransome. Oscar Wilde, a Critical Study, commissioned by the publisher Martin Secker, was brought out in 1912, but its career was foreshortened by a lawsuit for libel brought by Lord Alfred Douglas, who was retaliating against Ransome and, effectively, against Robert Ross as well for statements in the book regarding De Profundis, Wilde’s letter to Bosie from prison—statements that Douglas found to be untrue and damaging. In a letter to Ross, Douglas acknowledged that he had received a letter from Wilde, sent to him by Ross in 1897, which he “destroyed after reading the first half dozen lines” and still had no knowledge that it was the De Profundis that Ross had published and which Arthur Ransome had evidently seen.[9] Secker at once withdrew the book, which had been issued by the Times Book Club, but Ransome, who was aided by Ross in the preparation of his book and was allowed to read Ross’s copy of Wilde’s long letter to Douglas, stood the course. Ransome and the Book Club retained able counsel and prevailed in court the next year.[10] His approach reflected also an appreciation of the unity of his subject—the life and the works, taken together—capturing a clear understanding of how the man himself stood behind and became one with his writings. In a separate chapter, ‘The Theatre’, Ransome covers the entire range of Wilde’s work in dramatic form, giving pride of place finally to an extended analysis of Salomé. He first proceeds to differentiate The Importance of Being Earnest from the three other social comedies by viewing them as a kind of mixed genre: these plays "are interesting, amusing, clever, what you will," he explains, "but their contradictions have cost them beauty." In contrast, The Importance of Being Earnest, the most trivial of all, is the only one that affords "that peculiar exhilaration of spirit by which we recognize the beautiful." Because it never contradicts itself, this play achieves an admirable unity through "its dovetailing of dialogue and plot." Indeed, the two become one, "and the lambent laughter of this comedy is due to the radio-activity of the thing itself."
Ransome’s figurative use of a word, "radio-activity," its literal meaning not much over a decade old in the written language,[11] to mean something like "dynamic activity generated spontaneously from entirely within itself," represents a striking attempt to say something new and fresh about the quality of laughter. He acknowledges the difficulty of explaining the point; it is easier to say what it is not—not the uproarious laughter generated by farce, nor is it elicited by a kind of Shavian superiority of intellect. Rather, it is "the laughter of complicity": "We do not laugh at but with the persons of the play. We would, if we could, abet the duplicity of Mr Worthing, and be accessories after the fact to the Bunburying of Algernon." Cecily and Gwendolyn’s simultaneous speech does not insult our intelligence, "nor do we boggle for a moment over the delightful impossibility of Lane":
The Importance of Being Earnest is to solid comedy what filigree is to a silver bowl. We are relieved of our corporeal envelopes, and share with Wilde the pleasure of sporting in the fourth dimension.[12]
Even while identifying itself as criticism, Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study sets a model for the combined life-and-works approach that in the course of the twentieth century reaches its apex in 1988, in Richard Ellmann’s critical biography Oscar Wilde. Along the route, however, it acquires few worthy imitators. Many authors are content to be biographers, sometimes with an axe to grind, a thesis to prove, or a bias to assert (St John Ervine is a notable example of the last category[13]). Yet, slowly, in the first half of the century, interesting criticism begins to emerge—some of it with a welcome theatrical orientation. The constraints of journalistic deadlines often, but not always, prevent a theatre critic from pursuing an idea to its end. And collected reviews, in the case of such writers as Shaw, Walkley, Beerbohm, Montague, and their later peers, enable overall thematic resonances to emerge, deepening contributions to understanding about the drama and its theatrical dimensions that often go missing in the writings of more literary or academic writers.
Following the splendid, long-lived revival of The Importance of Being Earnest at the St James’s in 1909–10, the play had two more revivals there during Alexander’s tenure, in 1911 and 1913, as we have seen, but other actors played the roles of John Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff even while Alexander as actor-manager maintained responsibility for the staging.[14] Meanwhile, after his successful return to the role in 1909, the original portrayer of Algernon was far from being finished with the play. Allan Aynesworth would in good time take up a second theatrical career as a manager and producer (what Americans would call a "director"), while still sometimes playing major roles in the plays he staged. In 1923 he took the opportunity to mount a fresh revival of Wilde’s play at the Haymarket, which opened on 21 November and ran for sixty-one performances.[15]
Appearing almost thirty years after the original production of The Importance of Being Earnest, in a period on the far side of a catastrophic world war, Wilde’s play seemed, at least to some reviewers, a much different and, to others as well, a distant work. In fact, a mere decade had passed since Holbrook Jackson had published a confident, clear-sighted book about art and ideas at the end of the nineteenth century, but the felt distance was certainly there.[16] The critic for the Times admitted difficulty in getting right the historical character of that time. The period of the Nineties is not exactly beyond living memory, he acknowledged, but it has a "strange" reputation, sufficiently that some people think the play "should be played in the costumes of its period." It was only half-understood by audiences of the time; they laughed but remained "a little bewildered," or so it seemed to this thoughtful writer. It sought its effects through "a purely intellectual game"—namely, "the ironic use of deliberately misapplied styles". Styles (to call them that) were turned "inside out and topsy-turvy." It was the paradoxical quality of the wit and the action, finally, that proved the real novelty of the play, creating "an intellectual farce" that "rather staggered" its audiences. And yet the revival that the present writer attended the night before must not be dismissed, considering the "undiminished vitality" it exhibited. The Lady Bracknell, for example, varied in some nuanced ways from the rule, but should not be blamed for not having shown herself a true Victorian; neither the average theatregoer nor the actress herself would remember the original creator of the role, Rose Leclercq. And Louise Hampton realized the exact note of "fantastic absurdity" as Miss Prism. As for the Algernon, John Deverell’s portrayal was the hit of the night, achieving an "engaging fatuity" that was "at ease and at home in a part which is nothing if not engagingly fatuous." In the end, the current revival is of great interest, triumphing over the passage of time and impressing its auditors as the one play by Wilde that is destined to last.[17]
The forgiving attitude demonstrated by the Times reviewer was not attempted by other critics. The reviewer for the Nation & The Athenaeum, Francis Birrell, had a major complaint to air: this "most artificial of comedies was acted as realistically as possible," a point left unmentioned by the Times critic. A clue to this alteration in style may be discerned in the extraordinarily detailed stage directions to be found in Allan Aynesworth’s promptbook for the production. One may observe that this reviewer would seem to be implicitly joining the writer for the Times in sensing a stylistic discontinuity between Wilde’s play and the distance from it shared by present-day critics and audiences. Birrell also aligns himself with the Times critic in judging Wilde’s play to be "probably more verbally familiar to playgoers than any other comedy in the world." The connection between the familiarity of the play to audiences and readers alike and the consequent requirement for producers who intend to revive this "brilliant" comedy is that it cannot be presented as a contemporary work, but must be staged in "period." Stylization is the key to success. Take only one example, the garden scene of Act II, where "every flower was sculpted in the round." The difference between Cecily’s "impossible artificiality" and the "would-be realism of her surroundings became progressively more grotesque as the scene advanced." All the characters were "dressed in the latest fashions" and were "asking to be accepted as plausible denizens of Mayfair." They spoke their lines in an exasperatingly slow manner, as if the audience might otherwise not follow. As a result, because the audience knew the play so well they were constantly "three sentences ahead" of the actors. In short, it seemed that no one had given a single thought to any of the aesthetic issues relevant to a satisfactory staging. If there is some truth to the alleged old-fashioned quality of Wilde’s farce, the old-fashioned character of the minds behind the production was far greater.[18]
"Time has not been very kind to Wilde’s masterpiece," said the writer for the Observer, and the quality of the current revival has been "unkinder still." In fact, he had nothing kind to say about it. It should have been costumed in historical dress and played by comedians. The epigrams are tired out and cannot be updated merely by "ladies wearing the latest from Curzon-street." Wilde was certainly not a forerunner of the present moment, and to those who know Shaw he can "only appear a curiosity." Moreover, the acting was almost universally lacking. The Miss Prism should really have been the Lady Bracknell; the present occupant of the role, Margaret Scudamore, played it "entirely for aggressiveness." And the John Worthing, Leslie Faber, a fine actor in his own line of business, for light comedy "has no spark of talent at all"; consequently, the "froth of the play dashed itself in vain against his massive sincerity."[19]
The reviewer for the Saturday Review, Ivor Brown, steered a circuitous course through the various available alternatives of genre and period, even as he proceeded to evaluate his predecessor Bernard Shaw’s review of the original production. Shaw had thrown Wilde’s play well back into the less sophisticated period of the 1870s and the compulsive punning of H. J. Byron. Brown himself concludes that what Shaw saw as an old-style farcical comedy brought superficially up-to-date should now be correctly viewed as neither of the ’Seventies, nor of the ’Nineties, nor of today, but as "comedy absolute." Or, if the plot is too fantastical for comedy, then let it be deemed "farce on gilded stilts, farce of formal cut." It must not be cast in the "gabbled naturalism" that now serves as a vehicle for comedy. For some time during the first act he had dreaded a full relapse into such realism, but as the action went forward he found the players pulling themselves together and discovering "a technique for the starched make-believe that it all is." A notable sign for such an emotionless style is that Wilde’s epigrams "should glitter like icicles in the mind, untainted by any thaw of feeling."[20]
While assuming a point of view directly opposite to Brown’s on the question of naturalism, the critic for the Spectator took a fresh vantage point on the question of costume, an issue he believed fundamental for any producer of the play. He was in favor of "dressing it as a costume piece now" because he would have "dressed it as a costume piece when it was first seen." Its keynote is "aloofness," and its spiritual home is in the marionette theatre. The central characters are "accomplished marionettes," and as producer the more you can persuade your audience to view your characters as puppets, not humans, the better your play will fare. Therefore, Mr Aynesworth’s decision to dress his cast in "credible contemporary clothes" constituted a manifest wrong turn. The result was unfortunate throughout. The Lady Bracknell was too realistic and thus ever less convincing as the action advanced. The Algy needed to put more extravagance into his "engaging Bunburyism." The John Worthing was too stolid and lacked sufficient absurdity. Almost alone in her success, the Miss Prism came closest to "the high-spirited, light, yet bravura disassociation" demanded by the piece, evading the near-pervasive atmosphere of naturalism determined by the "general lines" Mr Aynesworth had set for the production.
For his part, Allan Aynesworth very likely had strong memories of the costumes he and the other actors wore for the original production in 1895 and similar happy recollections of how well and precisely they had hit off the contemporary ways of elite dress and behavior before a glistening, enthusiastic audience. After all, dozens of reviewers had complimented them for just those salient qualities. The manager, George Alexander, had modeled state-of-the-art gentlemanly fashion, even for mourning dress, and his knowing wife Florence Alexander had overseen the ladies’ dresses and hats with the faultless advanced taste and sure instinct that repeatedly drew starry-eyed gallery-goers, quick-sketch artists with practiced eyes, and reviewers for high-toned fashion magazines to St James’s first nights. It seems likely that Aynesworth’s intention had been to reenact that same glossy Mayfair miracle for a smart audience of circa-1923, who understood what attendance at a Haymarket comedy still meant. They were to witness a brisk yet faultlessly correct and "natural" updating of a nearly thirty-year-old play whose classic status would not intrude on its hilarious timelessness.
Aynesworth could not have been happy with the critics’ collective response. With one or two exceptions—the reviewers for the Times and Saturday Review, praising the play itself for its classic brilliance and reminding him of the audience’s having nearly memorized the text—they scolded him for being dreadfully old-fashioned, ignorant of social history and contemporary aesthetic theory, and inept at coaxing truer, more articulate performances out of perfectly competent actors. The list went on. Aynesworth managed to entertain people well enough to eke out some sixty performances, but achieved nothing like the more than three hundred nights his old manager George Alexander had realized about fifteen years before. It would require an even more faultless comic actor who also possessed superior instincts and abilities to discern the inner truths of such masterpieces and their correlative outer expression in order to fully succeed where Aynesworth had merely muddled through.
Such an actor would in due course make his memorable appearance.
In this same year of Aynesworth’s revival, an American multi-volume edition of Wilde’s works appeared, whose edition of The Importance of Being Earnest was thoughtfully introduced by the poet John Drinkwater.[21]> The play was not a comedy of manners, nor primarily a comedy of wit, Drinkwater said, but rather falls into a class all of its own. And by virtue of its mere simplicity it appears to be the only one of Wilde’s works "that really has its roots in passion." Every dramaturgical device keeps this passion out of sight, but it is there. This is to say that the play is "directly an expression of that part of Wilde’s own experience which was least uncontaminated and in which he could take most delight." The author’s great gifts of craftsmanship worked brilliantly to make up almost a thematic insincerity, with the result that there was more sincerity in this work than in any other he wrote. The social comedies have some of the qualities that mark his greatest achievement, but on the whole exhibit a frank surrender to a theatrical fashion he had "too good a brain not to despise." The Importance of Being Earnest, however, is "a superb and original piece of construction" and moreover reveals "a perfect understanding of dramatic speech."
Drinkwater perceives at one and the same time the extraordinary depths of Wilde’s talent and the grave human limits that it betrays. The specific greatness of his achievement comes from what one observes in any dramatic line, namely, that one finds "not three words in seven dramatically right but seven in seven," a singular achievement. Such excellence of form betokens the excellence of life that flows most clearly and surely through the play. Wilde saw "imperfectly or not at all" the deeply moving story of humanity; but
he did see, with a subtlety that can hardly be matched in our dramatic literature, that the common intrigues of daily life are not really the moralist’s province at all, but interesting only for the sheer amusement that can be got out of them.
What he gave us, consequently, was not Shakespeare’s comedy of poetic passion, nor Jonson’s comedy of humours, nor Congreve’s comedy of manners, but, in this one masterpiece that stands alongside their many, "the comedy of pure fun."[22]
Seven years after the original Algernon Moncrieff tried his hand at staging a revival of The Importance of Being Earnest, and in the same year that John Gielgud would first make a brilliant success as John Worthing in the same play, the variously experienced critic Arthur Symons published a latter-day retrospective—some thirty years after Wilde’s death in 1900—that revealed an unintended but striking affinity with Gielgud’s approach. Symons’s A Study of Oscar Wilde[23] attempts an estimate of how far his once-disgraced subject has come back from the depths to which he fell at the time of his trial and imprisonment. Symons explains his belief that enough time has passed, from the standpoint of changes in popular opinion, that a fair estimate of the long-term value of Wilde’s work may now be attempted. "His position after his downfall," Symons observed, "affords a curious indication of that invariably irrational swing of the pendulum which marks time for the British public." People who were once Wilde’s moral enemies now exalt him for literary reasons, and it now appears he has "arisen out of his grave to enjoy the posthumous honours."[24] In the middle of this brief book, in a chapter on the plays, Symons points out that in 1891 Wilde made the discovery that the witticisms that came to him so easily at public events could be handily wrought into dramatic form. The result was that, finding models for dramatic art in Sheridan and Alfred de Musset, and bringing to the dramatist’s task a wit "typically Irish in its promptness and spontaneity," he wrote three plays rather quickly which, like the first, Lady Windermere’s Fan, were seriously and tragically comic, but ended with a fourth, The Importance of Being Earnest, "a sort of sublime farce, meaningless and delightful." Symons’s comments here on the prevalence of stage tricks in Wilde’s plays were borrowed from his much earlier, somewhat niggling review of Ross’s edition of the plays in 1908. Symons has nevertheless more of interest to say, and finds a way to come to a balanced view, in a just, nuanced appraisal through the unexpected medium of the long letter written to Lord Alfred Douglas from prison.
There are passages in De Profundis, Symons observes, that are "among the finest pages" Wilde has written. Walter Pater had long ago found that there was something of an excellent talker about Wilde’s writing; and, truly, Wilde’s long letter "should be read aloud" and in its entirety, for "its eloquence is calculated for the voice." A beauty that hardly seems present in the text when read silently comes into it when spoken. His plays of modern life are "the only real works of art" produced in English since Sheridan, and some are finer than those of Wilde’s predecessor. Ultimately, Symons concludes, what is best in these works is what suggests actual talking, by one who spoke "subtly, brilliantly, with a darting and leaping intelligence." Whether dialogue or letter, this form of virtual speech allowed him an intellectual freedom that opened the possibility of personal appeal, "either with a mask or without it."[25] This, more than any other quality, is what attracts the reader.
It seems more than mere coincidence that in the same year in which Symons thought to praise the viva voce quality of Wilde’s writing, Gielgud and fellow actors mounted one of the most articulate productions of Wilde’s last play to reach the stage in the course of the century. The production appeared at the Lyric, Hammersmith Theatre under the direction of the celebrated actor and theatre manager Nigel Playfair, then in his twelfth season at the Hammersmith playhouse. With "characteristic panache and originality," Playfair mounted a production in the style of Aubrey Beardsley, entirely black and white and silver. The acting followed the distinctive style Playfair had established, consisting of "simplified realism, stylized gesture and formalized composition."[26] The cast included Gielgud (coming directly from his triumphant Hamlet of earlier in the year) as John Worthing, Anthony Ireland as Algernon, Jean Cadell as Miss Prism, and Gielgud’s aunt Mabel Terry-Lewis as Lady Bracknell. It had a great success, running for some 104 performances beginning on 7 July 1930.[27]
The Times critic raised what seemed the inevitable question—a troublesome one in 1923, as we have seen, but a happier, or at least a more sophisticated one seven years later. He asked whether the costuming should be naturalistic and faithful to the period, or "stylised" as at the Lyric, "so that the stage and the dresses become a pretty Beardsleyesque dream"? This critic viewed it as a dangerous choice. While the production was often pleasing to the eye, and some of the dresses certainly beautiful, the "artificial décor" was "more often at war with the play than in accord with it." The question of the style of acting had a much different, far more satisfactory answer. Wilde should be played, the Times critic believed, simply as Miss Mabel Terry-Lewis plays Lady Bracknell:
Her dry, incisive, unforced wit; her proud carriage; the exquisite precision of her emphasis; above all, her personal dignity that preserves a great lady in one who might have been a butt—these things make of her acting a standard by which other acting in this piece may be judged.
John Gielgud conformed to it: "His phrasing is quick; he maintains the tension of the dialogue; he discovers the music of this astonishing artificiality." Although the rest of the cast did not quite rise to the measure set by these two brilliant performers, they carefully avoided burlesque, achieving the remarkable grace of "always allowing Wilde to speak for himself in his own voice and not in the voice of a modern imitator."[28]
Of the various newspapers and journals that could be counted on for a coherent or even detailed review of important new productions, perhaps the two most likely to serve as journals of record were The Era and The Stage. The critic for the Era reminded his readers that Max Beerbohm once judged the play as "beautiful nonsense," going on to describe it as a "classic of artificial farce in which the characters speak some of the most brilliant lines in modern comedy." The play simultaneously suggests the ’Nineties and Aubrey Beardsley; style and grace are called for both in the acting and the production, and Nigel Playfair and his company do the play full justice, capturing the Beardsley manner in settings and costume. "Everything is black and white and silver, and the only touches of colour are in the greasepaint and the cake on the tea-table." Even the roses in the second-act garden setting are white, and the leaves are black. In this way the production breaks entirely with tradition. The reviewer says he noticed the omission of much familiar business. Algy, masquerading as Ernest Worthing, arrives on a bicycle because "the producer remembers that it was the special custom of 1895 for fashionable young gentlemen to do so." It raised a laugh, but the source of most laughter was the dramatist himself, whose epigrammatic wit seemed still fresh in the present day. Perhaps the chief novelty was the presence of "an entirely youthful cast." The critic’s memory of George Alexander as John Worthing was admittedly vague, yet clear enough to persuade him that John Gielgud made a superior embodiment of the character. Gielgud "was absurdly grave" and at the same time "beautifully appreciative of the fine quality of the writing." It was "artificial acting at its best." As Lady Bracknell, Mabel Terry-Lewis achieved a "superb dignity," and the other actors were also highly amusing and well contrasted with one another.[29]
There was a notable continuity in the audience, the writer for The Stage pointed out, perceivable in the fact that members of the audience included not a few of George Alexander’s old first-nighters. Examples of the detail presented by this journal in describing the range of black and white colou that so dominated everything that struck the eye, paying attention to both scenery and costumes, were the "prominent black peacocks shown fixed upon the railings of John Worthing’s garden at the Manor House . . . to contrast with the trees of white roses shown therein." In another example, "Worthing’s gray frock coat and suit of the period are set off against the funereal garb which John adopts to indicate his killing off of Ernest." The dresses worn by Lady Bracknell and by the rival young ladies Gwendolen and Cecily are entirely black and white "with changes rung upon them artistically." As for the Miss Prism, played by Jean Cadell, the same contrast of black and white, her plaid skirt, short black jacket, straw hat with black and white band, and snow-white shirt front were all variations on the theme. Even the Butler at the Manor House, Merriman, portrayed by Scott Russell, participated in it by way of his characterization of the role as "an old-style, white-haired, soft-voiced family retainer.?[30]
The oddest thing about imitating Aubrey Beardsley’s style by dressing and mounting the play entirely in black and white, as Nigel Playfair has done—not a touch of color, even in the garden scene—said Gilbert Wakefield, writing in the Saturday Review, is that "one hardly ever notices its oddness." Instead of the usually disastrous result of making such a choice, nothing is gained or lost, no doubt because "scenery and frocks are matters of comparatively small importance" when the play itself is wonderfully entertaining, is acted with such aplomb, and is played with such "astonishing freshness." Wakefield had high praise also for Jean Cadell’s "perfect" Miss Prism and the unorthodox approach of Mabel Terry-Lewis to the Lady Bracknell, usually performed as "manifestly terrifying" but here played "quietly and naturally." Referring to a current revival of Lady Windermere’s Fan, a badly acted production that exposes all the shortcomings of serious Wildean dramaturgy, Wakefield says he also remembers a "very dreary version" of The Importance of Being Earnest some years back at the Haymarket.[31] Compared with these unfortunate miscarriages of theatrical art, the current mounting of The Importance has every likelihood of being a "big popular success."[32]
In a brief review, the critic for the Nation & Athenaeum essentially agreed with his counterpart at the Times. After thirty-five years, he said, the play remains "beautifully fresh and enjoyable." In fact, he goes so far as to pronounce it the best English comedy "since the decay of Restoration drama." He also corroborates the general view of the "extravagantly good performance" of Mabel Terry-Lewis as Lady Bracknell and the equally fine showing of John Gielgud, fresh from his success "in the less difficult role of Hamlet," as Ernest, a role he plays "subtly and most effectively." Likewise, Jean Cadell’s Miss Prism would seem to have been written just for her. The reviewer allows that imitations of Beardsley are invariably "horrid," observing that half the value of the second-act coup de théâtre in which Jack enters in top-to-toe funereal garb is lost because it occurs in a scenic surround in which even the rosebushes are clothed in a garb of mourning. Nonetheless, Nigel Playfair deserves much gratitude for his production and for finding three such admirable performers to play in it.[33]
Not to be outdone by other reviewers’ praises, Ivor Brown, now the critic for the Observer, added welcome details. As Lady Bracknell, Mabel Terry-Lewis gave a performance that was a "model of articulation." As a result, her behavior is the nearest thing in the play to realism. Hers is a "plausible dragon," creating a perfect "snap-dragon effect," while John Gielgud is "no less delicious" in his "clear, decisive absurdity." Brown concludes that this "very happy production" may be threatened only by the current unusually fine weather.[34]
Uniformly enthusiastic praise, then, came from the critics of this production, except for the response of a lone and resolute holdout. The reviewer for the Sunday Times, James Agate, had a large, indulgent following, reflected in the often condescending tone of his writing and also in the presence in every column of at least one word sure to send his readers to a dictionary.[35] Almost the only thing Agate found to like in this production was Jean Cadell’s incomparable Miss Prism (admired but not described), whereas Gielgud, to his mind, was "totally unfitted for the part, not because he is a tragic actor, but because he is a serious one." Agate proceeds to launch a long, pejorative paragraph devoted exclusively to Gielgud’s performance, in which the actor’s total seriousness emerges as the behavior of "a serious actor pretending to be serious, which is nothing." In Agate’s hands, even success in a role (with the one exception of Jean Cadell) goes inevitably awry. Terry-Lewis’s Lady Bracknell was "wholly disastrous." She has no notion of how to convey the ridiculous, and so she dissects the character instead of reveling in the "gorgeous grotesque" quality of the role. Abandoning any attempt to create historical character, she instead brings to her analysis an anachronistic sense of the up-to-date. Other actors were equally inappropriate or far from adequate. But before he can return to Cadell, whose marvelous acting he deems deserving of description in detail, Agate finds his allowed space is at an end. If some readers detect "a certain perversity of judgment" in his remarks, he says, he will reveal the fact that he has always regarded Wilde’s play as "totally unactable." As a matter of record, he concludes, the first-night audience evidently found the play "very fine," but he cares not at all what readers who disagree with him may think.
Agate’s late-century biographer draws a vivid picture of the man who became in his time the doyen of London theatre critics and enjoyed a near life-long tenure in the reviewer’s chair for the Sunday Times, having arrived there in 1923 after a two-year stint at the Saturday Review[36] In other positions also, as late as 1947 (the year of his death), Agate often, if inconsistently, made clear his low opinion of Oscar Wilde as both dramatist and man. One finds at times an unsettling ad hominem quality present in Agate’s review of Wilde’s play even when he appears to be reviewing actors and not the dramatic work in which they appear. Even so, this review of the black-and-white Earnest seems blatantly defiant, or simply dismissive, of popular response, particularly in the case of a play with such a long history of superlative audience reaction.
Continuing to hold the attention of his Sunday Times audience as the years moved on, Agate would have even more to say of a controversial or negative kind, observations that served to distinguish him clearly, and sometimes adversely, from the opinions of his fellow journalists.
- Fay Compton was the actress in question; see Tanitch, Oscar Wilde on Stage and Screen (London: Methuen, 1999), 285. ↵
- "A Wilde Revival at the Haymarket," Illustrated London News, 1 December 1923, 1028. ↵
- Letter datable as [?July 1894] to George Alexander proposing a new farcical comedy, H & H-D, 597. ↵
- Montague, Dramatic Values, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1911). ↵
- Montague, Dramatic Values, 187. ↵
- The reference is to Shaw’s review of the first production, in the Saturday Review. ↵
- Montague feels no need to identify these comic characters as the creations of, respectively, Shakespeare (The Tempest), Molière (Dom Juan), Sheridan (The Rivals), and Goldsmith (She Stoops to Conquer). ↵
- Montague, Dramatic Values, 187–9. ↵
- Letter to Ross from Douglas, in Douglas Murray, Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2000), 171, quoted by Ian Small in De Profundis, Introduction, 16. ↵
- See in this regard two full-length biographical studies of Douglas: H. Montgomery Hyde, Lord Alfred Douglas: A Biography (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1985), 178–90, and Murray, Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas, 182–7.[footnote/] Ransome’s Oscar Wilde deserved the vindication it received. The author did not know Wilde personally, but he had a thorough knowledge of Wilde’s writings and had done his research exceedingly well, to the extent even of turning up obscure persons such as the Parisians Paul Fort and Stuart Merrill, connected in important ways with Wilde’s composition of Salomé in 1891 and its first production, by the Théâtre de L’Œuvre, in 1896.[footnote]See Donohue, ed., Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Plays 1 ↵
- Compact OED, 2nd ed. (1991), s.v. "radioactivity," "radioactive." Marie Curie and her husband Pierre jointly coined the term. The award of the Nobel Prize to her and Pierre Curie in 1903 served to popularize it, first in Science Magazine (citations s.v. "radioactive", "radioactivity," OED). ↵
- Ransome, Oscar Wilde, 152. ↵
- See below ↵
- Wearing, London Stage 1920–1929, 11.213, 13.43. ↵
- See the discussion of Aynesworth’s promptbook for this production in the Complete Works of Wilde, Plays 3, ed. Donohue, 679. ↵
- Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the nineteenth Century (1913), Intro. by Karl Beckson (New York: Capricorn Books, 1966). ↵
- Times, 22 November 1923, 12. ↵
- Birrell, "The Importance of Being Intelligent," Nation & The Athenaeum, 8 December 1923, 388–90. ↵
- ’H. G.’, "The Importance of Being Earnest," Observer, 25 November 1923, 11. ↵
- Ivor Brown,’Two Kinds of Trifle’, Saturday Review, 1 December 1923, 591–2. ↵
- Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 8, Intro. John Drinkwater (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1923), ix–xiv, excerpted in Wilde: Comedies: A Casebook, ed. William Tydeman (London: Macmillan, 1982), 97–8 ↵
- Drinkwater, Introduction, Complete Works, 98. ↵
- (London: Charles J. Sawyer, Grafton House, 1930). ↵
- A Study of Oscar Wilde, 13-15. ↵
- Symons, Study of Oscar Wilde, 87–88. A recording of superb quality attests to the truth of Symons’s observation; see Oscar Wilde: De Profundis, Read by Simon Russell Beale, Introduction written and read by Merlin Holland (Naxos Audio Books NA0210, 2015). ↵
- Cambridge Guide to World Theatre, ed. Martin Banham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 599. See also Robert Sharp, ‘Playfair, Sir Nigel Ross’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition (Jan. 2011), accessed 3 December 2015. ↵
- Wearing, London Stage 1930–1939, 30.251. ↵
- Times, 8 July 1930, 12. ↵
- Era, 9 July 1930. ↵
- The Stage, 10 July 1930, 16. ↵
- A reference to the Aynesworth production of 1923 and an example of the way a particularly wrong-headed approach can somehow brand itself in the memories of audiences and critics before it finally outlives its notoriety. ↵
- Wakefield, ‘The Two Oscar Wildes’, Saturday Review, 19 July 1930, 79. ↵
- Nation & Athenaeum, 19 July 1930, 501. ↵
- The Observer, 13 July 1930, 13. ↵
- Agate, ‘A Counsel of Perfection’, Sunday Times, 13 July 1930, 4. The "hard" word in this instance is "horripilation," a bookish term to refer to hair standing on end, or to "goose-bumps." ↵
- James Harding, Agate (London: Methuen, 1986), 66. Harding constructs a vivid portrait of the arrival in the stalls of "a burly gentleman who, urgent, ominous, bustled in with monocle dangling, spectacles pushed up over his forehead, ventripotent waistcoat starting forth like the prow of a banana boat. 'Better late than never!' he would rasp, collapsing into his seat and startling the other occupants of the row with a seismic shock that reverberated along the line. Mr James Agate, drama critic of The Saturday Review, had at last arrived" (64–5). See also some knowing comments by Harold Hobson in Hobson, P. Knightley, and L. Russell, The Pearl of Days: An Intimate Memoir of the Sunday Times, 1822–1972 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1972), 276–7. ↵