RUSSELL JACKSON 73

A classic without danger: the National Theatre’s Importance of Being Earnest

The lmporfance of Being Earnest has an advantage over most other English comedies of manners, in that its manners are still current, if only in the popular imagination. It is part of the English national self-image that those who move in ’Society’, employ servants and do nothing much in exchange for a stylish and comfortable life must somehow persist in the habits and attitudes shown in Wilde‘s play. Whatever the truth of the matter, this image of upper-class life soothes the average Englishman: it is one of those ’traditions’ that are really of late-Victorian and Edwardian origin but can be relied on to suggest timelessness, stability and material comfort. Poignancy can be added to the mixture by reflecting that the Great War was about to ’sweep it all away‘; a pleasurable warmth can be worked up by the more sophisticated awareness that it was all based on social injustice. A generation in which few Britons have personal experience of domestic service appreciates fully the subtleties of any scene between Algernon and Lane, Bertie Wooster and Jeeves or Lord Peter Wimsey and Bunter. Perhaps the appeal of these fictional masters and servants now lies in their presenting an informal age with images of a relationship at once intimate and formal. Deference has an exotic fascination. Audiences in the 1980s enter willingly into the world of the 1890s and its conservative mores. We are engrossed by the workings of the old code, by which girls are purer than men, marriage partners are chosen after the parents have scrutinised their financial and social qualifications, bachelor indiscretions can be atoned for by confession to a good woman, and black sheep must choose between this world, the next world, and Australia. The old rules are pleasing when they are enacted in fiction (such as Upstairs, Downstairs) and are essential to the real-life performance we exact from the Royal Family.

Wilde’s comedy has acquired ‘classic’ status by encapsulating an ideal of social principle and behaviour. Some details may need the annotator‘s elucidation, but the general lines are still part of our consciousness. An audience has less work to do with this than with Restoration or eighteenth-century plays. This gain in accessibility must be set against a loss. The play’s ironies are easily softened. The nostalgia with which it is viewed turns the author‘s radicalism into conservatism. The confidence and style of his characters attract us, and we ignore the discord between their

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A classic without danger 75

authoritative manner and the amorality of what they say. The persons of the play are pushed back into the stock social and dramatic types from which they were once a comic deviation. Lady Bracknell, for example, is Wilde’s transformation of a familiar type - the Marquise de St Maur in Robertson’s Caste is representative - by making her social and moral pronouncements shockingly illogical and selfish. She goes beyond cynicism, seeming possessed with a love of the imperative mood for its own sake: ’On this point, as indeed upon all points, I am firm’ (Act m. Nostalgia accepts caprice as an aristocratic privilege, harmless and endearing. Wilde‘s attitude to his creation seems (so far as this play suggests) to include a similar ingredient, but Lady Bracknell’s reactionary views are more threatening than they now seem. She is absurd but powerful; extravagant but efficient.

Some recent productions have attempted to convey this quality by extreme measures. Jonathan Miller assaulted the audience’s expectations in his 1975 Greenwich Theatre production by having Irene Hand play Lady Bracknell with a heavy German (or central European) accent. At least one reviewer thought her Jewish, and made a convincing case for this reading as suggesting her practicality, good humour and charm: ‘Shoulder shrugging, hand semaphoring, this is a Lady Bracknell who has acquired a knowledge of the world’s ways rather than inherited it. ”To lose both parents looks like carelessness” is therefore delivered mildly with a tiny smile as if both she and Algie knew the rules and humorously accept them.’’ A later production, of the four-act version, began with a ‘theatrical shock’ in its first moments: ‘For there, lolling in a golden seat, smoking and chatting to his master is Lane, that impeccable butler translated with no textual outrage into a young servant from Pinter territory, someone slightly sinister and even on intimate or sexual terms with his master. It gives that servile line ”I do my best to give satisfaction’’ a frisson of something which Wilde would have appeciated and probably did.’2 The same production offered a Lady Bracknell ’played absolutely straight by a man’. The resurrection of the four-act version is in itself a device to surprise the audience with something unexpected but authentic - although the four-act edition compiled by Vyvyan Holland and published in 1956 lacks true authority and incorporates material not added until the play had reached its final, three-act form. This need for some kind of theatrical or textual innovation may be seen as an indication of the play’s ’classic’ status: it should be approached with suspicion, and the audience must be protected from complacency.

At the same time we can identify another kind of ‘classic’ quality: we can speak with some confidence of a ‘right’ way for the actors to behave. Their deportment, tone of voice and details of their dress can be judged by reference to easily defined standards. The limits within which - in a

76 Critical Quarterly, voL 25; no. 2

conservative production - interpretation can range are well established. We have surer notions of Victorian behaviour than of its Elizabethan equivalent. Some spectators found Zoe Wanamaker, the Gwendolen of Peter Hall's production, too strident and self-assertive: the criticism derives as much from social understanding as from any interpretation of the play. Current notions of royal demeanour are inadequate when we apply them to the evaluation of a stage Clytemnestra or Cleopatra, and we must consciously supplement them from history and literature. The audience at Wilde's play is more confident in applying a stricter standard to the performers of Gwendolen and Cecily. Like opera singers, bound by a score and understood conventions of expression, the actresses of these characters have specific responsibilities. They have to steer between the mere rendition of a stock character and the adoption of an inappropriate manner. The author's ironic intention and the danger of 'nostalgia' compound the

This largely negative definition of a classic theatrical text so far includes its potential for being rendered harmless- it may be absorbed by the cliches we have made from it - and the limitations its period places upon the interpre- ter. To these can be added two further difficulties, for which Wilde can be held responsible. The first is its kinship with other classics of dramatic literature. It is (in the three-act version) a carefully-polished artefact, with a high degree of 'finish'. Although he liked to pass off his work as the product of flashes of spontaneous creativity, Wilde revised and improved over repeated drafts between August 1894 and January 1895. Then he revised the play again before its publication in 1899. He used passages from other works, and hesitated over the placing of words, sentences and entire sequences of dialogue. He had a high regard for the epigrammatic - for the surprising phrase which conveys a sense of its own paradoxical inevitability. Although some aspects of his work suggest a modernist's desire to subvert the notion of a realist work of art, Wilde seems to have acquired from his Greek and Latin scholarship a regard for formal values. The Importance of Being Earnest appears to offer by example a comic supplement to Aristotle'sPoetics. Its title (and subtitle) point to the Aristotelian concern with seriousness of subject and its hero (Jack) acquires both dignity and a new awareness by the third act. It has a 'classic' discovery and reversal. The action is confined to two days. A messenger brings the news which transforms the hero's life. Lady Bracknell herself is every bit as concerned with probability as Aristotle had been: 'in families of high position strange coincidences are not supposed to occur. They are hardly considered the thing' (Act m). Perhaps she is aware of the Greek's opinion: 'Stories should not be made up of irrational incidents; anything irrational should as far as possible be

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A classic without danger 77

excluded, or if not, at least kept out of the tale proper, like Oedipus’s not knowing how Laius died.‘3 There are other references to the poetics of drama in the play: Miss Prism describes her three-volume novel (‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means’) and Gwendolen remarks ’The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last’ as Jack searches for the hand-bag.

The second ’classic‘ quality bestowed consciously by Wilde, is the play’s relation to the drama of its own time. It seems to include the conventions of society drama (the more sophisticated descendant of melodrama), farce and Gilbertian extravaganza. For many students of English literature it is the only play between Sheridan and Shaw (drama students know at least Robertson and Gilbert). Apart from Gilbert’s libretti for Sullivan, the early Shaw and Brandon Thomas’s Charley’s Aunt, it is the only play of its century to enjoy frequent revivals. It has become the representative Victorian play. There is even a ‘classic‘ performance of it, that directed by Sir John Gielgud, which has been perpetuated on film and sound recording. Edith Evans’s delivery of one line (‘A hand-bag!’) has become established as a ’point’ after the Victorian manner: reviewers lie in wait for actresses as they approach the words. It has reached the A level syllabus, and it has been staged by an institution for which many of Wilde’s contemporaries canvassed, the National Theatre.

The settings for PeterHall’s production are handsome, but in the first and third acts they are altogether too monumental. The permanent floor is a shiny slab tilted towards the audience, so that Act II appears to take place on an outdoor skating-rink. Algernon’s room is stately, rather than ‘luxuriously and artistically furnished’ as Wilde directs. We seem to be in Whitehall rather than Half-Moon Street. In the third act a window is placed across the back of the stage, allowing for a striking silhouette effect as the curtain rises on the two girls, sitting together upstage behind a table. The set for the second act is - apart from the floor - peculiarly skimpy: a tree on the audience’s right, a somewhat insubstantial entrance to the house on the left and the outline of trees and the church steeple across the back. Peter Hall’s direction emphasises the formal qualities that mark some passages of the play (especially in the second and third acts) and have led critics to comment on ’operatic’ and ’dance-like’ technique. Hall has been faithful to most of the author’s stage-directions, and the three-act text of the first edition is given complete, without improvement or abbreviation.

This conservative approach offers a degree of security within which the life of the characters can develop, but it does not make for an especially stimulating evening. Wilde combines classical poise and farcical energy, but Hall favours the former. Those characters in Wilde‘s comedy who - on the

78 Critical Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 2

face of it - represent order, wisdom and stability are in fact selfish and assertive. The conventionally rebellious characters (Algernon and the girls) speak with confidence and appalling authority. The usual moral and social customs by which appetite is suppressed or expressed seem in abeyance: the situation recalls the worst excesses of the French Revolution. In Hall’s production the dynamism comes from Judi Dench’s Lady Bracknell and Martin Jarvis’s Jack. Nigel Havers, as Algernon, has a carefully cultivated youthfulness that enrages Jack. The effect is felt with Algernon‘s flourishing, buoyant first entrance and is carried through the play. It is appropriate - as Algernon tellscecily, his hair curls naturally, ’with a little help from others’- but it sometimes leads to overplaying. Gwendolen and Cecily (Zoe Wanamaker and Elizabeth Garvie) are complementary personalities, in both of whom romance and calculation meet, and Gwendolen already has much of her mother’s force of character.

From the moment he arrives in Half-Moon Street Jack‘s sobriety and maturer worldliness are challenged. First there is his argument with Algernon, during which Martin Jarvis shows him becoming flustered and anxious, unable to hide his agitation when Cecily’s name is raised. Then, in his interview with Lady Bracknell, he finds himself consistently wrong-footed. After the embarrassment of the interrupted proposal, Lady Bracknell is in control. When she hears Jack and Gwendolen blowing kisses she does not (as Wilde directs) look ’vaguely about as if she could not understand what the noise was’- she knows at once. Jack’s petty defiance in refusing the stool indicated by Lady Bracknell (‘I prefer standing‘) earns him contempt: she looks him up and down, witheringly. When Lady Bracknell remarks that he lives on the unfashionable side of Belgrave Square but that this ’could easily be altered’, Jack attempts to outsmart her by asking whether she means the fashion or the side, but this nervous sally gets him nowhere. At the end of the questions on his financial and social standing, Lady Bracknell appears satisfied. She closes her notebook, takes off her spectacles and invitingly pats the seat beside her: ‘Now to minor matters. Are your parents living?’ But as the truth emerges this intimacy is withdrawn. She leans away from him, registering the detail of the hand-bag as one of a series of increasingly ominous circumstances, building up to the indignation of ’The line is immaterial!’ She rips from her notebook the pages on which Jack’s credentials had been noted, and tears them carefully in half. The warmth in which he basked is taken away. Underlying the whole sequence is the sense that Lady Bracknell is attracted to personable young men (including Algernon) - so long as they have wealth and position. She has a romantic, idealistic side to her, which Gwendolen has inherited. When Lady Bracknell contemplates ignorance she takes off her spectacles and

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gazes raptly into the air: 'Ignorance is like a delicate exotid fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.' The moment is almost lyricaL

This ordeal makes Jack petulant, indecisive and ill-atAease. It shows when he asks Algernon whether a chill might not be hereditary and when he cannot decide how to spend the evening. Gwendolen seems to have the same effect on his nerves as her mother. She tantalises him with the offer of a kiss in the proposal scene, and repeats the trick when she comes back to get his country address. He is allowed to position hnself for a kiss as she ponders his 'simplicity' of character, but she turns suddenly away to get out her notebook on 'Your town address I have'. In the second act his elaborately contrived gravity suffers even greater shocks. He is pacing across the front of the stage in stately grief when Cecily's news that his brother is in the dining-room stops him in his tracks, one foot suspended as though a slow march had been interrupted just as the leg is held back for a beat. In his anger he gives Algernon's hand a painful squeeze ('It's pleasant, is it not, to see so perfect a reconciliation?') and continues to inflict it until he and 'Ernest' are left alone. When the two girls unite against them, Jack and Algernon achieve a temporary solidarity - however indignant Jack may be, there is still a bond between them - but the act closes with the elder partner enraged again by Algernon's fecklessness. As the curtain falls he indignantly empties a plateful of tea-cake on to the muffin-dish that Algernon is holding. It is in the final act that Jack's energy and confidence grow. He is more obdurate and confident now in his handling of Lady Bracknell. He has a sudden access of boyish high spirits when he discovers that Algernon is his brother (punching him playfully and tousling his hair). Jack dashes across the stage and flings himself up the library ladder to reach the army lists that hold the secret of his name. It is Jack's self-discovery that shapes the play, his exhilaration that leads to the triumphant tag-line: 'I've realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest'.

Lady Bracknell's intervention in the final act recalls that in Act I. Again she sweeps on and offers to check the course of love (this time in four people); she executes another volte-face when new circumstances are revealed (Cecily's fortune); she once more inflicts a cross-examination on someone (Miss Prism). There is a reminder of her interview with Jack when she insists that Gwendolen sit down - no chair is near her and she must either give ground or sit on the floor. Lady Bracknell's false exit and her turn back to the group when Jack mentions Cecily's wealth concede nothing to Jack's sarcasm ('Good-bye, Lady BrackneU So pleased to have seen you'). Her imperious 'Come here, Prism!' utterly cows the governess: Anna Massey glides sideways, downstage and across, her face averted from Lady Bracknell's glare. Hall's choreography of this scene is meticulous, following

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the symmetrical patterns demanded by the text. The part played in its triple pairing-off by Canon Chasuble and Miss Prism grows from the sensitive and restrained preparation given in Act 11 by Paul Rogers and Anna Massey. Chasuble has an engaging, ineffectively suppressedjoie de vivre. He reaches tentatively in the air for the metaphors that come off so poorly. His foot raises itself in a vestigial dance-step while his hand twirls in the air as he refers to the joyful occasions on which his sermon has been preached. When Anna Massey recalls the younger and happier days of Gower Street omnibuses and trips to Leamington her face lights up. Her happiness at being reunited with her hand-bag is heart-warming.

It would be unfair to suggest that this is an unsuccessful production. The audiences at both the performances I attended (in Manchester and Coventry) laughed a great deal and can be said to have been entertained to a thoughtfully directed, handsomely staged production in which all the acting is accomplished and some interpretations are outstanding. But Peter Hall cannot be said to have achieved the gaiety, deftness and sense of rediscovery that made the Shaw Theatre revival so remarkable. It had, as Irving Wardle wrote, an ’unexpectedly robust life’, showing us ’a company of brisk, acquisitive characters very much on the makeI.4 Perhaps it is intimacy that the play needs most, so that the actors can more easily overcome one consequence of Wilde’s epigrammatic, paradoxical dialogue - its tendency to come to a resting point rather than progress. The characters constantly reach for authoritative, unanswerable definitions, expressing themselves through statement and counter-statement, rather than by what A. P. Rossiter (writing on Much Ado About Nothing) describes as ’a kind of competitive vitality, expressing itself in quick manipulations of lang~age’ .~ There are historical reasons for this: Wilde is avoiding both the ponderous elaboration of metaphors (exemplified in Lytton’s Money) and the ghastly punning tradition which constituted between them the stock of Victorian comic dialogue. But the sense of outrage and energy need more to fuel them than Peter Hall’s ’clat. z” production allows.

Notes Review by Nicholas de Jongh, The Guardian, 21 April 1975. Review by Nicholas de Jongh, The Guardian, 30 July 1979. The production was staged on tour by the Great Eastern Stage Company, based on Humberside. Lady Bracknell was played by Desmond Barrit. Aristotle, Poetics, c h 24. Translated by T. S. Dorsch, ClassiCaZ Literary Criticism (Harmondsworth, 1965). The Times, 11 March 1974. A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns (1961), p. 68.

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