The Importance of Being Earnest at the Wharf Theatre, Devizes

The Importance of Being Earnest is rather like a newfound interest in jazz, you must “unlearn” the four-beat pop you’re accustomed to, to fully appreciate it. You have to rewind, temporarily forget Rick Mayall and Ade Edmondson, forgo all farcical comedy from The Goon Show to Charlie Chaplin, and leave your Tardis in late Victorian England, then, you will laugh.….in a hoity-toity kinda fashion!

Opening Monday, it’s a sell-out at the Wharf Theatre in Devizes already, assuring me you know the plot and backstory; though I caught last night’s dress rehearsal, I’m not sure I need review it, only to assure ticket-holders they’re in for a good night, express, once again, why you gotta love our communal and hospitable town’s theatre, and maybe attempt to convince you I’m an intellectual!

One of the few plays I’ve read, I’m reminded how ironic and sardonic towards pomposity Oscar Wilde was, and how much trouble he got from it; surely making The Importance of Being Earnest a Victorian Men Behaving Badly, albeit written by a genius of twisting narrative the like I find unable to make a modern comparable.

I find myself wondering how, or even if it’s possible, to modernise it, as they did with Brewster’s Millions, for example. For it lambasts the snobbery of Victorian social etiquette as nonsensical, ridiculing the formalities of gentry as preposterous folly, and though it suggests insincerity and fabrications should be morally neutral, our protocols to be so feigned with social interactions has drastically improved through equality since, making this feel somewhat lost in time. Such is its ex-post facto beauty, concluding some things are best left the way they are.

This leaves the happy ending scene questionable by today’s standards. In an unfeasible modern twist it’s surely likely both Jack and Algernon would’ve been victims of their own circumstance; akin to a double-act of Basil Fawlty and Basil Fawlty. A modernisation of the play would end (spoiler alert) with the penultimate scene, where the ladies discover Earnest was a big, fat double-whammy fib to get in their knickers, and the boys would’ve been summoned to punishment for their deceptions, liable to sharp kicks to their respective groin-areas!

True, isn’t it? Modern girls wouldn’t have given these unsuitable and practically unhinged suitors the time of day! They’d receive only a two-finger salute, probably de-friended and condemned on Facebook, and they’d both be rung out to dry on Tinder, no matter how loaded they are! It is then, with a curiosity of Victorian ethics which makes this play so endearingly comical, classic and impossible to modernise; go tell Disney!

Though, with a line in the play ironically defuncting happy endings I hadn’t picked up on till last night’s fantastic dramatisation of it, I strongly suspect that is precisely what Wilde was getting at, only leaving me ponder what he would think of our era today. There’s far more connotations to encrypt from this play than first meets the eye, but at least he wouldn’t be threatened with a bouquet of rotten vegetables from his boyfriend’s pop and in his attempt to sue the Lord, get banged up in the big house for it. More likely the Lord would get a wrap on the knuckles for a hate-crime; proving how far we’ve emancipated and why this play is so intriguing and poignant, if outmoded comically.

And it’s played out wonderfully, Rob Finlay plays steadfast Jack Worthing, Oliver Beech makes the perfect punster Algernon Moncrieff, and their conflicting characters ricochet off each other like they were performing this in Melksham’s Bounce House!

Sophie Kerr plays Gwendolen Fairfax, and Anna McGrail is Cecily Cardew, elegantly defining the constricted mannerisms of Victorian ladies, and Wilde’s attempts to satirise it. Comic gold from Debby Wilkinson as Lady Bracknell and Jess Bone as Miss Prism, particularly when the two finally clash. Rob Gill is the bumbling reverend, Tony Luscombe and Ian Diddams make the perfect butlers.

Lewis Cowen is one dedicated director who has made this play shine beyond the rafters of the Wharf. I think you’ll love it, being far more intellectual than me, and I finish with an oxymoron Oscar Wilde might be proud of me for; oh, awfully witty, what-what! Photographer Chris Watkins was there, trying to grab some images from him to illustrate this with, for now, I apologise for not taking photos, but guarantee you, it’s yet another stunning performance.