James Agate’s response to Gielgud’s 1930 production is all the more curious and inconsistent when compared with his reaction to the revival of The Importance of Being Earnest that emerged a few years later at the Old Vic, opening on 5 February 1934, for a run of twenty-eight performances. The brevity of this run should be understood not to indicate a failure but, rather, in light of the Old Vic’s status as a repertory company, as part of a planned season of plays each with limited runs, causing occasional necessary shortcomings in casting and scenic effects.[1] This time, it is Agate who is full of praise, while the critic for the Era deplores Wilde’s total lack of “sincerity, humanity, indignation, or a sure and sympathetic understanding of human vanities and weaknesses”; with regard to such qualities, said the Era, this playwright “is empty as a drum.” And yet, if the playgoer nevertheless likes Wilde, he will find that Tyrone Guthrie’s production is as good as one could hope for. Guthrie has captured the period qualities of the play and nicely emphasized its artificiality.[2] Molly MacArthur’s scenic designs are of a piece with her costumes, J. T. Grein observed about this production in his omnibus review of the week’s “World of the Theatre” for the Illustrated London News. The glitter of Wilde’s play remains “untarnished,” Grein added, thanks to the fact that it was created by a process of “spontaneous combustion.”[3] Writing for the Observer, “H. H.” identified Wilde’s play as high comedy and compared it to Congreve’s Love for Love (the next play to be performed by Tyrone Guthrie’s company); practical differences between the two “are more apparent than real.” Acting in high comedy requires “self-confidence based on high competence.” This was widely but not universally in evidence in the Old Vic production. Athene Seyler as Lady Bracknell played her “famous inquiry into the handbag past of her daughter’s suitor” like the set piece it was, “a deliberate display of witty pyrotechnics.” Charles Laughton’s “unctuous Vicar” was “perfectly audible and pre-eminently unfrockable.”[4]
The Times reviewer heartily agreed. The merit of Guthrie’s production throughout was his acknowledgment of a suitable principle: “[t]he more frivolously extravagant Wilde’s invention is, the more certainly should it be allowed to make its own effect.” Although Roger Livesey’s John Worthing was not remarkable, some of the actors were especially successful. Charles Laughton’s Chasuble was “thick with the oil of gentlemanly hypocrisy.” Almost throughout the evening, in fact, one had the impression of ‘living in the company of people to whom genius, like cucumber sandwiches, is a commonplace’. Nor did the critic for The Stage, who noted the planned limitation of a month’s performances for Wilde’s play, see any disadvantage to its joining the repertory as played by the full company. When it includes such capital actors as Athene Seyler as the Lady Bracknell, the hit of the evening, no one can complain. Her “admirably clear diction” and “brilliant high comedy work” won her distinguished praise.[5]
Given these reviewers’ inclination to accept what an enterprising repertory company with a masterful director might achieve, one would have expected to find James Agate more than a shade less tolerant. And yet Agate began by saying, “This old play for a band-box theatre triumphed brilliantly over several handicaps.” Granted, the scenery for Act I made it look as if Algernon lived in a museum; his boots, and Jack’s as well, looked like cast-offs; Worthing’s butler seemed to have come straight from playing the burlesque circuit; and so on. These strictures seem to speak of a first-hand witness’s intolerance of how repertory companies survive and even thrive on their limitations; and yet, uncharacteristically, Agate keeps his spirits high and explains how the company triumphed over shortcomings. A fine example, he said, was provided by Athene Seyler as Lady Bracknell:
Miss Seyler, who normally looks like some magnanimous mouse, swelled to Wagnerian size and gave a performance of such wit and gusto that every line was in danger of being lost through being drowned in the laughter greeting the one before. But Miss Seyler knows what she is about and did not throw away a comma.”[6]’
Maintaining his good mood, Agate went on to award Flora Robson even greater praise for her Gwendolen:
Personally, I don’t think I shall ever again get so much delight out of Gwendolen as Miss Robson gave. She delivered that young lady’s conscious inanities with that throaty intonation she normally uses for approaches to pathos, only emptied of its pathetic significance. She looked delightful, too, uttering cool paradoxes with an air wittily at variance with a hat resembling a bird sanctuary.
“Does the play date?” Agate asks rhetorically. Only one word would suffice: “Admirably!”[7]
Regular readers of the Sunday Times might well have been surprised at such enthusiasm. As they had seen, this same play was described by Agate four years before, in his review of the 1930 Hammersmith “Black and White” production, as “unactable.” One wonders if the absence of John Gielgud from the central role in this Old Vic production could have had anything to do with Agate’s complete turnabout. Possibly, a test case would emerge in the next London production of Wilde’s play, in winter 1939—not only with Gielgud once again in the main role, but with Gielgud as producer, directing what historians and aficionados of twentieth-century British theatre would not hesitate to call a near-perfect cast: a combination of brilliant players rarely to be found.
Gielgud brought the play out under some special circumstances. For years it had been a common practice to perform plays with a special claim to significance or a special attraction as a vehicle for fund-raising at isolated matinees, when actors constantly employed in the evening might be available for a limited time earlier in the day. In the eight matinees presented at the Globe beginning on 31 January 1939 for the benefit of theatrical charities,[8] John Gielgud brought together a remarkable company of able, seasoned performers and promising neophytes who ended up drawing large, enthusiastic audiences and equally excited critics. Reviewers implicitly vied in frequent superlatives with critics of George Alexander’s first production, almost forty-five years before. Gielgud had evidently made the decision to print in the program the original 1895 cast alongside that of the current offering; the Times critic, seizing on the singularity of the moment, printed both lists, “for history’s and for courtesy’s sake,” as he explained. These are the two cast lists:
(1939)
John Worthing, J.P. John Gielgud
Algernon Moncrieff, Ronald Ward
Canon Chasuble, D. D. David Horne
Merriman, Felix Irwin
Lane Leon, Quartermaine
Footman, John Justin
Lady Bracknell, Edith Evans
The Hon. Gwendolen Fairfax, Joyce Carey
Cecily Cardew Angela Baddeley
Miss Prism, Margaret Rutherford
(1895)
John Worthing, J.P. Mr George Alexander
Algernon Moncrieff, Mr Allan Ainsworth
Canon Chasuble, D.D., Mr H. H. Vincent
Merriman, Mr Frank Dyall
Lane, Mr F. Kinsey Peile
Lady Bracknell, Miss Rose LeClercq
The Hon. Gwendolen Fairfax, Miss Irene Vanbrugh
Cecily Cardew, Miss Evelyn Millard
Miss Prism, Mrs George Canninge
The Times critic also recognized Gielgud’s frank intention to challenge his audience to a comparison—had they been alive long enough to be able to make one. Open to detailed criticism though this present production is, said the critic, “by and large it is the best that any but the most senior playgoers can remember.” For the first time in current theatregoers’ experience, Wilde’s play, he pointed out, “is being given in its own tradition.” It should be, and it is here, played in its period, as Sheridan is or should be played. It should not be mocked, or ragged, or mauled “as a twentieth-century joke.”
The reviewer goes on to offer a comment of rare insight. There are certain qualities of performance whose possession is a basic requirement for success with this particular work:
that every phrase be spoken for its shape; that the impression be given that this fantastic language is the language naturally used by the ladies and gentlemen who utter it; that the wit appear to be sufficient unto itself, needing no barrage of grins to prepare its coming and no winking of the eye to emphasize its advance; and, finally, that every one, whether their reported origin is Belgrave Square or Victoria Railway Station, shall appear to have been bred on the floodlit side of the Elysian fields.
It is said, the critic remembers, that Alexander and Aynesworth had developed these qualities to perfection some forty-four years ago; the present production may well achieve it before the eighth matinee is out. Surely, the masterly performances of the major actors in this production already could hardly be bettered.[9]’
No one—except for the entire audience, he jokingly reported—enjoyed the production of this play so much as the critic for the New Statesman and Nation. It leaves one wondering, he said, whether this one play of Wilde’s “is not the funniest play ever written.” It is positively “nonsense immortalised by style.” One of the most accurate and insightful of observations ever made about the central character, John Worthing, is the quality that Gielgud realized in his performance: “he maintains a vexed solemnity of demeanour, never revealing the fact that he finds his lines fat and funny.” His phrasing “is exemplary,” his “timing exact.” The reviewer’s one objection is to Edith Evans’s characterization of Lady Bracknell, whom she coarsens “into a loud-voiced termagant”; he would have much preferred “the fatigued acidity” that Mabel Terry-Lewis brought to her performance some nine years before, in the Lyric, Hammersmith black-and-white production of 1930. And yet Edith Evans makes her role “a wonderfully full-blooded affair.” No other living actress could imbue the word “handbag” with such depths of comic expression. Costumes by Motley were quite wonderful, but the decor by the same designer failed in the two interiors, which were too “obtrusively realistic” for so stylized a play: “their careful ugliness is out of keeping with the elegance of the language.”[10]’ The author of this review did not sign it, but it has all the marks of articulate, perceptive insight found in the New Statesman and Nation review signed by Desmond MacCarthy of Gielgud’s re-staged production, also performed at the Globe, in August of this same year.
This wonderfully successful revival had something of the air of a circle come full, with two actors from the original production of 1895, Allan Aynesworth and Frank Dyall, the original Algernon Moncrieff and the original Merriman, the butler, being on hand to observe the proceedings. The writer for the Globe could hardly contain himself for his fulsome praise:
The dialogue has the beauty of verbal fireworks. Often this pyrotechnic quality is found in other modern comedies, but only Wilde found the way in his time to give the pyrotechnic display the continuous charm of a catherine wheel, gracefully as well as brightly spinning out and about its cascade of audacious epigrams and weaving them into a fluent pattern of high-comedy deftness on a low-comedy framework. . . . The dialogue kept the audience rippling with laughter from start to finish.”[11]
Meanwhile, on the Sunday after Gielgud’s production opened on the previous New Year’s Eve, James Agate published in the Sunday Times what was as much a freestanding essay as a review of the production. The very fact that a reviewer could test the patience of a regular readership to this extent indicates the high regard in which this long-time critic was held. His topic, the “dating” of plays, refers to the passing of time and the aging of plays, “which like furniture can go out of date and begin to creak, or despite the creaking can transcend time and become what the world agrees to call a classic.” His title, “The Dating of Plays: An Appeal to the Pit,” gives notice that readers were going to be asked to reconsider the relationship between a play most persons assumed was a “classic” comedy and the playgoing society that held in its hands the future of theatrical performance. The “Pit” to which Agate appeals is surely a metaphorical one, the “pit” that was the articulate, responsive center of the traditional auditorial triumvirate of “box, pit, and gallery.” This was the active center of a paying audience on whose good will and approval the theatre management depended. Evidently, the time had come for this audience to be educated about a matter perfectly vital to them.
Citing an insight made by the contemporary dramatist Allan Monkhouse, Agate observes that even in a jocular kind of play one expects a dramatist to keep things steady by mentioning “the Union Jack or the sanctity of home.” Yet the fact is that Wilde does not trifle with “morals or realities,” and respectable citizens find this disturbing. They don’t understand how to “place” such a play, because although it is of an age it hasn’t obviously dated. The truth is that Wilde’s masterpiece, Agate patiently explains, “belongs to no time and no place.” There seems to be no model for such an airy abstraction because it has no forerunners and so far no successors. As a result it is very difficult to act. Players have to perform it with “immense gravity” and yet totally without seriousness. And so, still citing Monkhouse, Agate concludes, “Actors who are accustomed to big sentiments and the emphasis of common farce must part with something of their specific gravity in this atmosphere.” One begins to think of them as, somehow, floating in air.
Apply this thoughtful, perhaps troubling observation to the actors’ performances in Mr Gielgud’s production, and some odd results show up. Gielgud as John Worthing evidently aims at establishing the humourlessness of his character, but he ends up conveying “a sense of dudgeon,” like a king who finds himself in an “unseemly Drawing Room” until he can let his anger simmer down, out of loyalty to the author. Indeed, it may be the role is unplayable: for how does the actor reconcile the humourlessness generally required of his character with the wayward impulse to invent that imaginary brother?
Agate’s theoretical application is difficult to follow because he does not see the play as anchored in a conventional, concrete sequence of generically similar plays stretching back into dramatic history, or giving rise to future plays much like their predecessors. To venture the opinion that most plays are like most other plays would to him be an intrusive and irrelevant observation, in the present context. The comment by a reviewer of the first production that the play has more echoes than Prospero’s isle is simply not relevant to Agate’s view of Wilde’s play as in a real sense weightless. To take another example, the two young ladies in the play, Joyce Carey’s Gwendolen and Angela Baddeley’s Cecily, fail for being too realistic.They are too clearly descendents of that “brittle piece of nonsense,” Congreve’s ingénue Millamant in The Way of the World, “strange and well-bred”; and yet, unlike her, they have “little that is strange about them.” What Agate means, it would seem, is that they do not fit as uniquely belonging to Wilde’s unique play, the way Millamant does to hers; they are not more or less inane or dewy than the ingénues of any other comedy. The same fault may be found with David Horne’s Chasuble, who fails because his character is recognizably a country rector and no other. His realistic manner would be admirable in what the author himself calls his work—a serious comedy for trivial people (Agate’s calculated inversion of the phrase Wilde ended up with as his subtitle)—but this play is actually no such thing.
We begin to see what we think Agate means until he comes to Margaret Rutherford’s Prism and Edith Evans’s Lady Bracknell. Here the farce “comes to full flowering”—and in so doing appears to turn Agate’s theory upside down or to render it entirely beside the point. For it is the case that he must finally tell the truth about the two finest performances in the production. Rutherford’s Prism “could not miss perfection if she aimed wide of it.” And doing anything like justice to Evans’s Lady Bracknell would require an entire essay. And there, with a parting gesture of admiration for the upholstered grandeur of the Lady’s costumes and for her two hats, in one of which swans nest and in the other a rooster crows, Agate’s ambitious but frustrating analysis of the dating of plays breaks off.”[12]’
Yet Agate’s review was by no means a hoax. His praise for Allan Monkhouse’s brilliance is sincere, and his notion of the uniqueness of Wilde’s farce is genuine and full of insight into its mock-generic singularity. One wonders, in addition, whether, writing some nine years after Gielgud’s demonstration of his own masterful analysis of Wilde’s timeless creation of the play’s central character, Agate has realized that he went astray in that earlier review and, by way of reparation, found an ingenious way to make amends. For, in fact, his detailed criticism of Gielgud’s alleged failure in the 1930 Lyric, Hammersmith production identifies precisely the same issue of seriousness that Agate pounced on then and brilliantly reconstrues here, encapsulated in a new understanding of the great generic difficulties confronted by the dramatist, which Agate believes not even Gielgud could solve, or could do so only up to a point. But the actor does so with great determination and conviction, most especially in the way he captures Jack Worthing’s deeply grounded irritability (as we have noticed, Agate calls it “dudgeon”). It is a basic character trait for the role itself; Wilde had explicitly called attention to it in annotating an early typescript, and Worthing maintains it down to the very last moment of the play. Agate’s description of Gielgud’s acting makes it quite clear that the actor found this a genuine keynote to the role, and performed accordingly.
It was therefore no surprise, despite the looming shadows of war in Europe, that Gielgud could contrive to remount this production, albeit with several changes in cast, once again at the Globe, beginning on 16 August 1939, and carry it on until 24 February 1940, for a total of 92 performances, including many matinees.[13] The new actors included Jack Hawkins as Algy, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies as Gwendolen, Peggy Ashcroft as Cecily, George Howe as Chasuble, Pardoe Woodman as Lane, Kingston Trollope as Merriman, and Douglas Malcolm as the Footman (a role not always identified in the list of characters). By common consent among the reviewers, they each were considered an improvement. Meanwhile, except for Hawkins in the role of Algy (who brought new life and energy to the part), the major roles remained the same: Gielgud as Jack Worthing, Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell, and Margaret Rutherford as Miss Prism. Indeed, the Times critic noted the changes and concluded that rather than weakening the original production they did precisely the opposite, fortifying it against certain possible criticisms of the former cast. In fact, the Gwendolen came across “as the charming and absurd buoyancy of a tiny coloured ball rising and falling on a jet of false simplicity.” George Howe “takes the comic measure of Canon Chasuble with twinkling precision.” As for Peggy Ashcroft, her Cecily Cardew “comes into the pageant like a rightly placed jewel, let us say, a chrysoberyl, which changes colour with the light, now instantly olive-green, now an audacious pink.”
The Times reviewer, like Agate himself, observed the prominent quality of Jack’s “solemn irritation with the trifles that vex his notion of propriety.” And yet, however decisively “the solemnity and irritation are expressed,” there remains continuously implicit in Gielgud’s performance “a faint, elegant disdain for aught in life but manners and raiment and the cut of a phrase.” This would surely have pleased Congreve and even Wilde himself. For Gielgud never allows his character “to mar with serious emotion” the one comedy of the time “consistently and deliberately trivial.” Indeed, this production improves on the original series of matinees of the previous winter by adding “that extra half-ounce of lightness and spontaneity” that results from more thorough rehearsal. It is now the case that every actor on stage seems to be inventing quite carelessly “the most brilliant dialogue of the last hundred years.”[14]’
Peter Fleming, writing for the Spectator, looking back at Max Beerbohm’s review of George Alexander’s 1902 revival, discovered the critic’s prediction of immortality for Wilde’s play.[15] Forty-seven years later, it was now posterity’s turn to congratulate the prophet. Fleming makes a special point about Beerbohm’s criticism of Alexander’s less than proper treatment of Wilde’s text, and praises Gielgud for, unlike Alexander, committing “neither the folly of omission nor the crime of a gloss.” Wilde’s mainstay was not wit, but nonsense. It came into vogue in the late nineteenth century, according to Chesterton, has not failed to improve its “imperishable properties,” and now The Importance of Being Earnest still continues to derive from nonsense its remarkable staying power.[16]
Following its customary duty of being the journal of record, the Era for 24 August 1939 devotes two columns to the plays of the week but gives almost an entire one of these to the current ‘Glittering Revival’ of The Importance of Being Earnest. Headlined “The Importance of Being Farcical,” the review manages to involve almost every character in a single question, namely, whether the play is comedy or farcical comedy. It makes a very large difference, the reviewer explains, since the decision must affect the style of play throughout. The question is, should the play be “produced in the spirit of its dialogue or that of its idea and manner?” It was Oscar Wilde himself who raised the issue, in a letter to George Alexander in which he says the following: “though the dialogue is sheer comedy,” the play “is, of course, in idea farcical.”[17] The Era reviewer pursues the question by indicating which characters are closer to comedy, such as Algy, and which closer to farce. Closest to farce, it may surprise us to learn, is John Worthing himself. As played by Gielgud, he comes across as a “farcical-comedy on reality, a strict denial of probability, a perfectly absurd earnestness that, one imagines, skims the cream of interpretation off the character for ever after.” Indeed, most of the characters, it turns out, from the Gwendolen and the Lady Bracknell to the Cecily and the Miss Prism, fall into the central category in which Gielgud has produced the play itself, a “fantastic farce, which dazzles rightly and evenly like a cut-glass chandelier in a great drawing room.” Finally, all of them move in the mood of farcical comedy, “improbable to the point of impossibility.”[18] The issue that had begun with some considerable interest has been foreclosed by shortness of space.
The critic for The Stage was full of praise for the production standard that Gielgud set, for the “care and accuracy given to the play as a period piece,” and also, looking at it from a technical point of view, for its “precision and poise,” which are no less than admirable. The only note of caution the reviewer felt it necessary to add was to urge Gielgud not “to attempt any further touches of stylization, as in the dual movements of the two young men in the scenes with Lady Bracknell.” One may gather from this that Gielgud has added fresh business in Act III in the spirit of the stylized action involving “Siamese twins” behavior originally introduced by Alexander and retained in Winifred Dolan’s transcription of his promptbook, in 1898, before Wilde eliminated it in preparing the text for the first edition—a most interesting example of stage tradition.[19]
As reviewer for the New Statesman and Nation, Desmond MacCarthy had a wider, more open hand. MacCarthy’s scope and penetrating approach were evident in his first paragraphs on Gielgud’s revival of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. He wondered out loud whether, in the closing days of the 1895 premiere of Wilde’s ill-fated play, perfectly innocent lines, such as Cecily’s reproach to “Ernest,” “I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time,” went on being “hailed with delight.” Continuing to look back to a period before his time, MacCarthy captured some central characteristics of Alexander as an actor. Alexander never did anything better than his “Ernest,” he explains:
Alexander was an able actor, not a first-rate one, and Wilde himself once complained that he never acted but “only behaved.” In every part he was always his handsome self-controlled self. He excelled, I recall, in pardoning erring women with a man-of-the-world-cum-King-Arthur air, raising her from her knees or waving hands that blessed. He had a fine and emphatic presence, and an effective turn for ponderous tenderness and giving grave advice. Therefore with these gifts I can easily believe that “Alexander-Ernest’s” sudden appearance in the sun-lit garden of the second act in deepest black, and his slow decorous gestures of unutterable woe, must have brought down a crash of unforgettable laughter.[20]
He never saw Alexander in the role, he admitted, and yet his imagination was so reliable, he felt, that he has used his concept on every other Ernest he has seen. Gielgud is the third of them, and the best. MacCarthy is a self-demonstrated master of observation, and he captures the minute but most revealing details of acting as well as or better than any other critic of the day. Of Gielgud, he says, “He is a quick, highly-strung Ernest,” who “sits, leaps up, moves, strips off his gloves, with elegant restlessness”; he often “speaks with a low-voiced rapidity, sometimes, I regret to say, to the point of becoming barely audible in this effort to compose a personality round this nervous conception of the part.” Sometimes he looks “genuinely miserable,” but there should not be a single moment when he “ceases to be amused at himself”; even when most agitated, he should hint that “his predicament is a feast of fun to himself.” This applies equally well to all the rest of the characters, for the play is “a genuine artificial comedy,” the best since Congreve’s.
This is MacCarthy’s theme, and halfway through his piece he reveals its secret: “performing an Artificial Comedy is to impersonate people who are already impersonating themselves and reveling in acting their own characters.” Every gesture and intonation, he explains, should be “self-delighting,” but “never a betrayal of direct feeling.” Modern acting has destroyed self-conscious acting, to the near ruin of Wildean comedy. Almost no one deliberately puts form and flourish into the roles in which life has cast them. Now that Yeats is dead, “Is there a poet left who behaves and talks like one?”
MacCarthy’s review offers in evidence a dozen more delicious examples from the play, but his point is clear. His final advice to Gielgud is to speed up the end of the play, which is too long and ponderous (years before, Alexander, dismayed at the most recent turn of events, had given himself this bit of advice, much to Max Beerbohm’s annoyance[21]), and also to embrace Miss Prism more violently when he greets her as his Mother, allowing Miss Rutherford to emit a more piercing scream.
MacCarthy looks back to Beerbohm; Ivor Brown, to Bernard Shaw. Brown revisits Shaw’s accusation of heartlessness against Wilde, the author of The Importance of Being Earnest, in reviewing its first production. Judge every comedy by the standards of Cervantes, and who shall ‘scape whipping? How can someone complain of lack of sympathy in a world full of babies in black leather bags and greasy muffins on a summer afternoon, set in a “metaphysical Mayfair” or a “bewitched Belgravia in whose coverts lurk fancies quick as birds and dragons fell as Lady Bracknell.” Shaw must have had his mind disconcertingly full of other matters. The performers are magnificent, Brown goes on to say. Edith Evans’s aspect was a Sargent canvas, making Lady Bracknell’s every line “a challenge or a chastisement. Descending like some great fowl from splendid and uncharted skies, she can see no roost without ruling it and hear no crow without o’ercrowing it.” For her to say “A handbag” “is to bring all the heavens of Mayfair crashing in one thunderbolt.” Gielgud’s modest self-abnegation as director lets all the others shine, allowing their points to dominate his.[22]
Other reviewers fall back upon the seemingly easy brilliance of actors’ descriptions without possessing the superstructure necessary to forge them into an understanding of the play itself. Richard Clowes, standing in for the holidaying James Agate, found serviceable metaphors for hats and tones of voice, along with deflating criticism for other critics’ reviews.[23] The reviewer for the Illustrated London News limited himself, in the course of a long single paragraph, to miscellaneous comments comparing costumes of yesterday and today, to the benefit of the former, except to the extent that the well-dressed woman of today wears exactly what her grandmother wore.[24]
John Gielgud was eminently lucky, first, in finding the opportunity to restage his eight winter matinees in a perfect August summer for some ninety performances; second, in drawing such a preeminently brilliant cast and setting such a perfect example of style and substance for them; and, third, being reviewed by such intelligent critics as Desmond MacCarthy, Ivor Brown, and James Agate.[25] Few critics, with the rare exception of such sharp-eyed observers as MacCarthy, have the presence of mind and ability to retain a segment of a scene long enough to write down their view of it. All the same, the best of them have gifts of mental synthesis and abstraction that allow them to talk about the way a play comes together, both in the minds of the actors and in the collective sense of the audience. Evanescent though much of it must be, and communicative to us largely in bits and pieces, through the cumulative effect of reviews we may still participate vicariously in the experience of a time gone by. And so we may come to realize that John Gielgud emerges as the preeminent John Worthing of the first half of the twentieth century, and that those other brilliant actors with whom he surrounded himself were together able to mount several productions of The Importance of Being Earnest in this period that loom large in the collective memory.[26]
Another writer, who as a very young man knew and followed Wilde in his last years, had observations of some matter to make about his plays and their characters. In one of the first books that artfully bridge the gap between biography and criticism, Vincent O’Sullivan set down some accurate, truthful observations in his modestly titled work Aspects of Wilde, published in his old age, in 1936. Recollecting the 1930 “Black and White” production, he observed that the stylistic reference to Beardsley that prevailed throughout the production was, he believed, a mistake. What Wilde’s plays required was “to be played frankly and largely in the spirit of the hour in which they are being played,” the reason being that they are “not at all historical or periodical” but, rather, “popular and sentimental, and therefore of constant appeal.”[27]
Evidently, O’Sullivan takes the part of some of the reviewers we have encountered who believe that modern dress is the right choice, despite language that is in some cases no longer current and attitudes and values that are now out of date, in view of the universality of characters such as Mrs Erlynne, the clandestine mother of the title character in Lady Windermere’s Fan, and the constant articulation of wit that has no historical precedent but only imitators. As for Wilde’s characters, in order for them to be effective criticism of corresponding real-life personages they would have to be “real characters, built and rounded from the feet up and moving in their own special atmosphere”. That is “just what the characters are not in any of Wilde’s plays.” And yet, because he was a poet, he was sometimes “seized by his own characters” and so “pauses to watch them live like human beings.” Mrs Erlynne is O’Sullivan’s primary example.[28] Later in the book, however, O’Sullivan modifies his notion of Wilde’s characters by explaining that “his best personages are conducted through the drama with such vigour and logic that it becomes impossible for them to escape their particular truth.” This is ultimately the reason why Wilde’s plays must be dressed in contemporary costume, O’Sullivan believes. This author’s plays cannot be viewed as pictures of the 1890s, for the reason that “they are pictures of a society which Wilde saw in permanence through the eyes of Scribe and Dumas fils.”[29] Evidently, O’Sullivan is convinced that this society must be rendered transparently through the medium of costume no different from that worn by the audience that views the play. It is an ingenious solution, nowhere else to be found, to the troubling, perhaps insoluble question of how to dress the actors in Wilde’s four major comedies.
Succeeding chapters will revisit the surprisingly thorny question of what costuming is most suitable for producing a play about which many critics, actors, and audiences themselves discover that they have strong, perhaps even unchangeable, opinions.
- Wearing, London Stage 1930–1939, 34.27. ↵
- The Era, 7 February 1934, 6. ↵
- Illustrated London News, 3 March 1930, 320. ↵
- H. H., "The Importance of Being Earnest," Observer, 11 February 1934, 15. ↵
- "A Wilde Revival, The Old Vic," The Stage, 8 February 1934, 10. ↵
- Athene Seyler led an unusually long and successful career as a high comedy actress, playing in the course of time both Miss Prism and Lady Bracknell. Later in life she exchanged a series of letters with her younger contemporary Stephen Haggard on comic acting. In one of these letters she explained that plays are divided into three categories, poetic drama, drama and comedy, and high comedy, the last including The Importance of Being Earnest. Such plays are in type somewhat more superficial and so call for "a different style of execution from that used in straight comedy acting. They need the lightest touch and the most detached point of view, for they deal with externals. The Importance of Being Earnest is one of the greatest examples of this type of comedy and concerns itself with the conventions of society of its time. It shows the absurdities of the well-bred, cynical, easy manner of the 'upper classes' with its levelling of all emotion and experience to apparent indifference, its correct attitude for the ingénue, the glossing over of what lies beneath 'Bunburying', and . . . it is this polite custom of not taking anything seriously which makes the eating of muffins as important as the discussion of troubles" (Seyler, The Craft of Comedy, 68). ↵
- ’Sunday Times, 11 February 1934, 6. ↵
- A list of the charities was printed in the Globe: Actors Orphanage, Theatrical Ladies Guild, Actors Benevolent Fund, General Theatrical Fund, King George’s Pension Fund, and the Soho Hospital for Women (Globe, 2 February 1939, 10). ↵
- ’Times, 1 February 1939, 12. ↵
- ’[?Desmond MacCarthy], New Statesman and Nation, 11 February 1939, 205–6 . ↵
- Globe, 2 February 1939, 10. ↵
- James Agate, "The Dating of Plays: An Appeal to the Pit," Sunday Times, 5 February 1939, 4. ↵
- Wearing, London Stage 1930–1939, 39.205. ↵
- Times, 17 August 1939, 8. ↵
- Fleming would not need to have had recourse to the original Saturday Review publication. A limited edition of Beerbohm’s works, including two volumes of criticism, was published in 1924, and another two-volume edition followed from New York in 1930. In the course of that period, Beerbohm’s Around Theatres has itself become a classic of the reviewer’s art; see "The Importance of Being Earnest," Around Theatres, 188–91. ↵
- Fleming, Spectator, 25 August 1939, 289. The reference is to G. K. Chesterton, late Victorian and Edwardian critic noted for his conservative views. ↵
- The reviewer’s text of Wilde’s letter comes very close to the actual words as found in Wilde, Complete Letters, [?September 1894], 610. He could have found the text in Mason, Alexander, 73, published just four years before, in 1935. ↵
- "The Importance of Being Farcical," Era, 24 August 1939, 8. ↵
- The Stage, 24 August 1939, 10. For a discussion of the original Siamese twins business, see the Critical Apparatus and Commentary on the edition of The Importance of Being Earnest in Plays 3, ed. Donohue, 830, 990. ↵
- Desmond MacCarthy, "Artificial Comedy," New Statesman and Nation, 26 August 1939, 305–7. ↵
- See Beerbohm’s review of Alexander’s 1901–2 revival, cited above ↵
- Ivor Brown, ’The Week’s Theatres’, Observer, 20 August 1939, 9. ↵
- Clowes, ‘Forty Years After the Survival of the Wittiest’, Sunday Times, 20 August 1939, 4. ↵
- "The Playhouses," Illustrated London News, 26 August 1939, 358. ↵
- For the moment, at any rate. But there is more to be said by and about James Agate, as will be seen below ↵
- From a later perspective, the historians Joel Kaplan and Sheila Stowell make much of the significant changes in costume that occur over the decades of production of Wilde’s play from 1895 to 1939, with details reflecting an abundance of research. In summary, they observe that the developments in stage costume for the Lady Bracknell character represent an important shift, from the original "comprimario" role (a subordinate character in the cast of an opera) to a later star turn, as in the stunning performances of Edith Evans with her enormous Edwardian hats, followed by a series of celebrity performances by Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, and others including male actors in drag (Kaplan and Stowell, "The Dandy and the Dowager: Oscar Wilde and Audience Resistance," New Theatre Quarterly, 15, no. 4 (November 1999), 318–31; see also Kaplan and Stowell, Theatre and Fashion). Gielgud’s further triumphs with Wilde’s play, at the Phoenix, London, in 1942, with Edith Evans and Cyril Ritchard, and with various players in Canada, the United States, Britain, and elsewhere in the course of wartime and after, will add further substance to some eventual stage and film history of The Importance of Being Earnest, as a successor to Robert Tanitch’s economical overview, Oscar Wilde on Stage and Screen, which contributed to the above account. Unfortunately, no space has been available in the present narrative for an account of the rich history of film productions of Wilde’s play. ↵
- O’Sullivan, Aspects of Wilde, 205–6. ↵
- O’Sullivan, Aspects of Wilde, 19–20. ↵
- O’Sullivan, Aspects of Wilde, 205–6. ↵