The Play Podcast - 090 - The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde

[Music] Welcome to the Play Podcast with me, Douglas Shots. [Music] Before the curtain rises on our episode today, a brief reminder, if I may, about becoming a patron of the Play Podcast. For the price of an ice cream or two at the interval, you can not only help me to continue to make the podcast, but patrons can also hear or read additional content about the plays that we cover, as well as have early access to the Play Review, our sister podcast where Jody Rylott and I share reviews of some current productions on the London stage. Our two newest patrons are Milovan Marassovich and Chris Messina. Welcome and thank you both. For more information on becoming a patron, please visit our website at theplaypodcast.com. Many thanks, and now on with today's episode. Hello and welcome to episode 90 of the Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. I'm Douglas Shots founder and host of the Play Podcast. The curtain rises on a luxuriously and artistically furnished room in a gentleman's flat just off Piccadilly in London. The sound of a piano is heard. A man servant is arranging afternoon tea on the table, complete with cucumber sandwiches. After the music ceases a young man enters. He is Algernon Moncquif, and he is expecting his aunt, Lady Brachnol, for tea. However, his friend Ernest Worthing arrives unexpectedly, having traveled up from his country residence to amuse himself in town, something that he and Algernon not infrequently do together. On this occasion, however, he has come with a specific purpose of asking Lady Brachnol's daughter Gwendolyn to marry him. But Algernon has stumbled upon an impediment to Ernest's plans, a secret about his identity that will lead both men to perpetrate further deceptions in pursuit of love. This is Oscar Wilde's importance of being Ernest, possibly the most famous romantic comedy in theatrical history. The play is renowned for its effervescent portrait of aristocratic amusement, and its impossibly clever wit, including some of the most quotable lines in dramatic literature. But it is also an anarchic parody of social, custom, and pretension. Written just months before the scandal in trials that would destroy Wilde's reputation and life. It was first performed at the St. James's Theatre in London in February 1895, and wild himself said of the play, with characteristic modesty, "The first act is ingenious, the second beautiful, the third abominably clever." This is our first Wilde play on the podcast, and we start with his last and greatest. I must confess that I wasn't sure how well Wilde's masterpiece of Artifice would stand up to contemporary scrutiny. But any fear that it would now come across only as an overly precious and dated drawing-room farce was dispelled by the exuberant new production that is currently running at the National Theatre in London. Its ravishing visual design, its self-conscious knowingness, its championing of un-inhibited aesthetic values, and the frank forefronting of the play's sexual resonances, all these make this a modern rendition that I can't help but think that Wilde himself would have loved. So, I'm hugely fortunate and delighted to be joined today by the production's director, Max Webster. Max is a prolific director whose recent work includes his acclaimed production of Macbeth, with David Tennant and Cush Jumbo at the Don Mar Warehouse, and which just concluded its run in the West End this past week. He also directed this autumn's revival of the real thing at the Old Vic, which inspired our recent episode on the play. And other recent credits include Henry V at the Don Mar, where he's been an associate director for the past four years, and the extraordinary staging of Life of Pi, for which Max was nominated for Olivier and Tony Awards for Best Director. Welcome to the play podcast, Max. Thanks so much for joining me. Thank you so much, Mr. Speaker. My first question is, do you remember when you first came across this play and wanted attracted you to want to direct it now? I wonder if you feared if you could make it a fresh as I may have suggested. So I read the play as a kid. My dad was in an amateur production of it. Ah, great. In very soon, Edmund, he's in the 70s, and we had in our house as I was growing up a five-bit of photo of him and his massive purple, bell-bottom flares with long curly locks on his shoulder. It was a twenty-one-year-old kind of steed-and-taxer during the play, and he would regain his stories of it. So I think we had a very old copy of it from the '60s or something, which little paid back, and I read that as a teenager and really liked it. I liked the wit, I liked the surprise of it, the art of it, and I suppose in a way I sort of understood that Wild was representing some sort of freedom, although probably 12 or 13 years old, Max never asked you anything. It didn't quite understand what that kind of did for freedom was at that time. So you had some understanding of it as a teenager. So what brought you to thinking, oh, I could do it now? Well, I've always tried to turn it around in my head as a sort of remix tube, as can you make the play do something slightly different from what you expect it to do. So I've seen a couple of really good traditional productions, and they're reliably funny, and they're a reliably cleverer. But it feels that something about Oscar Wilde's enterprise as a writer was subversive, or it was kicking against the norms of Victorian society. So Oscar Wilde is not as posh as the character he's writing. He's Irish, so he's an outsider in London, and he's coming to see all the kind of English social rules as constrictive, and in some ways essentially arbitrary. And of course, he's a what we now call gay or queer man who is being forced to live in a heteronormative Victorian society and can't talk about his inner life, his private life publicly, and indeed the moment when he starts to do so, his memory gets arrested. And so there is a kind of critique in Oscar Wilde's work of those Victorian rules and a critique of the funny, dirty, nested Victorian art. And I guess a sort of, we can talk more about this, a kind of liberatory enterprise that kind of thought that actually through art and through fiction, through storytelling, you can kind of be and become the person who dream of being or want to be, which I think is what I sort of came to understand as the deep gambit by the point of being honest. But for a long time, I was quite confused what to do with it, because I knew what the stuff you've Victoria were doing and production of it was, and I didn't know how you could lightly modernize it without breaking it. And so between the period when Rufus Norris used the artistic director of the National Theatre said, "Do you want to do this?" and the moment we started to rehearsals was a lot of kind of trying to turn it around in my head and see how bold could you be, especially around gay and queer subtexts in the play, without making the main mechanism of the plot for the part that undernakes sense. Yeah, I mean, so many good points in there, and I love the fact that you say that it represents freedom in all sorts of ways about where it comes from in wildlife as well. Can you tell us in fact a bit more about where it comes from in his life in Korea, because it was quite a tumultuous time in his life when he wrote it and then when it came to the stage, wasn't it? Yes, so Oscar Wilde had been established as a successful playwright. So Lady Windom is a fan of a woman who's no important to being successful players and making him, for the first time in his life, real money. And so he was doing well and he's got a kind of level of acceptance in polite Victorian society that literary success and scandal, but the literary success was bringing him. And I guess a couple of years before he wrote, he points to being honest, and before he wrote his other masterpiece, The Picture of Dorian Gray, he started regularly having sex with guys. I mean, presumably that's something he'd thought about all his life, but he hadn't been able to act on it regularly until recently. So there's something really interesting about the activation of his sexuality in his private life, and then suddenly the kind of artistic and financial flowering that comes with that, that discovery of freedom. And so the important thing then, this happens exactly the fulcrum in his life of how brave and how bold can he be about what he's able to say and do about his sexuality in his private life before he gets into trouble with the law. And the famous story is that on the opening night of the importance of being Ernest Bozy, he was his boyfriend. Bozy's father was the Mark Bliss of Queensbury, who invented the Queensbury boxing rules, and was very very unhappy that his son Bozy was in a relationship of sorts with Wilde, and to be stormed down the theatre trying to get in and make a scandal, he had boxer to support him, a sort of extra muscle to intimidate him or worse, perhaps. And then in the end, when they wouldn't let him in, went to Covent Garden and bought a bouquet of rotting vegetables, left him at stage door with a card for Oscar, saying, "You're a posing sondamite," which is a misspelled word of the slurr sondamite, and that's what led to the libel case. And so Oscar Wilde either, in an act of foolishness or an act of great courage and bravery, depending on how you want to view the story, suit him for libel, and that led to the counter-suing who gendered up him in Reading Jail. So in a way, it puts being Ernest Bozy in one sense seems like the most trivial comedy, almost like a play about kind of nothing, like a hot air balloon that just sort of rises and rises and rises with nothing in its center, is also the work in which he is almost the closest to speaking his personal truth, and that absolute cost of how far can Oscar push it, before he gets arrested, before he gets put away. And so it's also the fact that he's a real man, and he's a real man, and he's a real man, idea of the players to kind of airy nothing, the souffle version of the players, the version I'd be brought up doing and seeing, but the version of the player that's still fun and silly and got lots of jokes and I think that it suddenly becomes a heavy evening. The version of the player is also about how far can you push these conversations in Victorian England before you get putting a redding gel? That wasn't a version of the player I'd seen. So that was what I was interested in exploring. Yes, and the production balances that beautifully because there is still, I think, faithfulness to the original text, but also this contemporary lens to some degree, or that at least releases some of this subtext that's there in the play. Because as you say, in the main, we assume it's a concoction, something frivolous, but there is much more going on there. But you're right, the irony of the timing is just terrible. What happens to Wilde is tragic. It's fascinating. You point to the idea that there's this coincidence of his sense of freedom and his artistic output because he was incredibly prolific in the early 1890s. But the clouds were gathering. There was a lot of gossip about the scandalous life he was leading in the couple of years leading up to when the play was actually done in early 1895. One can now, I guess, with hindsight think that some of this might have been foreshadowing of what was coming to him, and whether he was risking putting stuff out there in this regard, but it is also, on the other hand, it's hard to imagine that he really imagined it was as dangerous as it turned out to be, of course. Well, I think Borsk's way of dealing with these things is wit. So the wit weirdly is a trojan horse for saying the unseeable. So if you can say something charmingly enough or funnily enough, you can kind of get away with saying anything. At least that's what you thought, and eventually you reach the limit of what that is. So in his first trial, the prosecutor said to him, did you kiss this? You're mad, you have sex relations with this person. His answer wasn't, I don't know, I don't have sex relations with men. His answer was, oh no, he wasn't nearly good looking enough. And that's what everyone laughed, and that seemed to be okay. And they weren't able to tell me bothered by that answer. And because it was said daringly and bravely and it really got laughed in that moment, kind of wit became a way of saying the unseeable. And the humour was a form of defence in a way. And that happens in the play too. The wit is saying things that are more serious than they would suggest. And you're right, I mean, actually came across some of the transcript of the trial. And it is an extraordinary performance while putting on on the witness stand, just astounding how witty, as you say, he is and how brave he is in behaving in that way. It is wondrous. Actually, it could come right out of his writings. It's beautifully delivered. And as you say, funny, but of course, it's in the wrong context ultimately. And he can't evade it. And of course, as you said earlier, it's somewhat self-inflicted, but it's one where he was persecuted by a society that could not accommodate who he was. And it had a real impact on the play. The play opened to acclaim just a few weeks before the trial started. But then when the trials were going on, the box office receipts fell and the producer tried to save the production by removing Wild's name from the playbills, but it still closed after only 80 performances. And indeed, Wild's name was not featured on posters and programs on revivals for the play for some time afterwards. So yeah, his reputation, but also his spirit and his health were destroyed by all that happened to him. It was interesting that at some point during that period where he was writing so much and wrote this play, he said something about work never seemed to him a reality, but a way of getting rid of reality. So somehow he was escaping, I suppose, what was going on in his life. And perhaps the play actually presents a positive spin on his lifestyle and the way it could be, or he hoped it could be sustained. But sadly, reality could not be evaded forever. Yes, it's a play in which all the young people managed to evade reality through fiction. So Jackson's the beginning of the play, I've got a brother and my name's Ernest and their lives at the beginning of the play, their fictions. And by the end of the play, they don't have to be true. He sort of his fiction comes to life as it were, or assessively start writing with letters from this person he's never met. He's going to whisk all her feet and then suddenly, like, imagine his friend appears in her garden into the fiction that she's writing becomes true and that becomes her life. And so I guess it's that's Fleming by Man's Patriot in the play, which is that I think the player is dressing that if you can tell the story of your life in a creative enough way, you can sort of manifest that way into being. And of course, that isn't totally possible if you're a 19th century gay man, but that wish or that dream or that fantasy is very freeing, I think. Yes, I mean, he actually expressed it seriously, didn't he? And talking about life imitating art and that sort of thing. And in a way, I guess he was trying to live his own life in this artful way. And the play is a representation of that. Man, as you say, the plot and the structure of the play is beautifully constructed. Everything means the opposite. Yes. The man are pretending to be someone else, but they turn out to be true, the things that they've been saying. But also it's completely absurd what goes on in this plot. Yes, totally, totally absurd. None of it is credible and yet we somehow buy it and just float through it. Starting with the fact that the women insist that they can only love and marry someone named Ernest. I mean, that's just ludicrous, of course. Yes. I mean, the good argument of the world is the further than 20th century culturally in some ways and that you can see both branches of political activism and socialism coming off his work. You can also see branches of surrealism and absurdism coming off its own work. The theatre of Beckett and Ian Esco isn't really possible without why I think it's that weird end of the 19th century bridge point in which you can see it's happening in the world's work. So like a woman who's no importance for an ideal husband and much more traditional Victorian melodramas in that they take the story of the fallen woman and satirize it and twist it and complicate it so that you go, actually, maybe it's the patriarchy that's felt rather the fallen woman. So it is already, you can see that's more like taking the Victorian form and giving it a social meaning. I guess what he does with the point of being Ernest is he takes a traditional form of the fast and he takes the ground away from under it so it becomes lighter and weirder and harder to get to deep meaning and that kind of gesture is I think at the heart of the absurdist theatre of the 20th century as well and I'm sure wilders of huge influence on that. Yeah, it's fascinating you say Beckett actually our very last episode was waiting for Godot and incidentally discovered that Beckett went to the same school while did. One of the things that makes me really happy in our show is for various practical reasons. We staged the muffin scene in front of a red curtain so that we can do the change from X-ray to X-ray to X-ray to the live without a second interval and it makes that little scene which I love and is so beautifully performed by Shrew to Gatwaw and Hugh Schimmer but it kind of reminds me of Beckett because they even make a joke about waiting for the scene change to go and it suddenly becomes not only part of the story but it becomes also a scene about waiting and sort of not really about anything particular other than two people filling time with their own company and with language and suddenly in my heart in my head we're kind of in Beckett land albeit with a red curtain and beautiful white suits. I absolutely love that scene it's so delicious and actually I don't know whether this was ad lib or not it probably was but on the day I saw it Max, Hugh was speaking while he was eating muffins and he turns to shoot tease and he said sorry I just spat on you. And that's not scripted I didn't see that show. So this brought the house down because they had corpseed for a bit at this point and we were all thinking this is brilliant and then at just moments later he's chewing away on the muffin and Hugh is waiting for him he says Hugh is overdue and he says sorry I was just chewing properly there it was just brilliant stuff anyway we diverge but the other thing that it suggested to me again I thought this earlier today I thought no this is too outlandish the connection with Goddo which was that Al-Janon and Jack seemed like a bit of a comic double act as Vladimir and Estagon are in Goddo with Jack perhaps being the straight man to Al-G's constant nonsense as he puts it does that make sense it does there's a void of ultra-dition that wild had seen both in the UK and in America and that gives a certain kind of rhythm to the dialogues that he's got and that's definitely in some of that that's a double act rhythm okay well yeah when we talked about the absurdity the improbability of the whole plot is crazy and I'm saying about hinging on marrying the man named Ernest we got the improbable moment of distraction in which misprison puts a baby into a handbag and her novel into the pram and the romantic plot is absurd Al-Janon literally falls in love and proposes to Cecilie within an hour of meeting her but we say else straight through that as well that's all fine it's just glorious fantasy really isn't it I mean yes it's glorious fantasy there's also meaning behind all of it so that I guess I think you're about misprisons baby in the novel which is that if one of the thoughts in the play is that you can kind of write your own life that's one of us go out manifestos the whole play hinges on the confusion between a baby and an origin story and a two-volume novel and the two get mixed up and so like the baby that goes on to be the life and the novel which is another life are interchangeable in some ways and so fiction and life is muddly and it's partly that sort of layering of a deeper meaning in Swift I don't think you want to think anything about it particularly but it gives it a kind of emotional reality of or a logic when it comes up, I think you accept it, because it feels the massively linked to what's been going on rather than just a totally random thing. And I guess thinking back, I must marry someone called Ernest. I mean, Ernest of course means something particular to Ireland. So Ernest is a code word for same-sex love in the period. - Aha, that was gonna ask you about the title and the subtitle. There is what we would take as the obvious double meaning of Ernest, as in Ernest, E-A-R, and E-S-T, the adjective that means serious, not trifling, it could mean ardent bracket in desire according to the O-E-D. But you say it's a particular type of desire, I've also wondered about Ernestness as in Ernest of whether something's truthful. And there's of course a lot of un-serious and untruthal, or really is it truthful? - Yes. - And of course he has that classic subtitle, a trivial comedy for serious people, which is a classic, epigrammatic inversion, but it also means something to him, does it not? - I think so. I mean, Ernest is interesting. So love in Ernest is the first book of poetry published publicly in the English language about love between man and its linked to the word urnest, which is a code word for gay man in 19th century. So from Uranus, the planet I think. And so I need to marry someone whose name is Ernest. Is a sort of weirdly multi-lead cake, because it means someone who's got a particular Christian name, so it's a bit random. And so therefore it's satirizing people's obsessions. You know, so in Victorian society people are obsessed with. I will have this pink ribbon, and I will have a man called Ernest. So that's the first level of satire. But then there's also, I will marry someone who's Ernest, who's kind of authentic and sentimental. And that's a sort of satire on the Victorian culture of sentimentality and truth telling, and we must be frightfully serious in our art and have like art of Sullivan's lost chord playing on the organ and Tennyson's patriotic Christian poems, being dead in the background. So that's being satirized. Yeah. And then I guess behind that is like I must marry someone who's queer or gay, I guess, in order to make this potentially queer triangle work. We've got to all be in it together. And we've got to find out each other and marry together. And then so then by the time the whole thing is like wrapped up in a bow at the end, was I finally discovered the importance of being Ernest. I mean, at least in our production, it's played by his skiner who stands up on a table and opens his arms in a wonderfully flurried gesture. It's meaning really, I think, the points of being yourself. So I finally discovered the importance of being myself. And in the context of a play that thinks about gayness or queerness, that that means the points of coming out, the importance of being truthful to yourself and that the story he tells about being called Ernest, which is the kind of brain fiction at the beginning of the play. By the end of the play, he's able to be it in a way. He's written his way into a free life, which he's able to be himself, which he is able to be Ernest to his own desires. That's brilliant. You've done most of what we were going to actually address in terms of the meaning of this play. That's fantastic. In your production, there is perhaps more to what maybe referred to as the implicit queerness or in your production. And it's more than implicit, isn't it? It opens with Al-Janon playing the piano dressed in a glorious pink gown. The whole production is a great celebration of queerness, in a sense. And it's suggested by the fact that these two men are very much leading double lives, aren't they, as wild as himself, of course, did. Al-Janon has this fictitious friend, Bonbury, who he goes off of the country to see and get up to whatever, and Jack pretending to be his bad brother Ernest and coming to town, the flip side of their lives. It allows them, as you say, these freedom to be something else other than that society would constrain them to be. So they are leading these double lives, which was essential, of course, that they needed to be discreet. This wild, maybe taking some risk and not being as discreet. Well, I don't know how much risk. I mean, no one in the original production, no one publicly saw it. It doesn't mean that potentially we didn't privately see it. But no one wrote about anything gay in the show when they saw it. I guess it happens at different levels. So there is a set of retinences that are very much coded for people in the know. So leaving your cigarette case, for gentlemen, to leave one cigarette case with another man's house, is a very clear signal in that period. And maybe launching was a code word. And Duchess of Bolton was a code word. And Ernest, of course, was a code word. And so there were lots of code words through the whole play, which are very explicit. You can knew about them. And I guess the audience is also at that point that's slightly trapped in not being able to talk about it. Because to talk about it, to admit to know about it, is to sort of implicate yourself in it. And so no one's allowed to talk about it. So that's one of the gambits of the play. But then as you're starting to unpack, the queerness goes deeper than just a bunch of surface references that does go into structure. So as soon as you talk about two men who need double lives in order to be able to satisfy themselves exactly, then clearly in the context of Oscar Wilde, him leading a life in high Victorian, to pose these straight society, and then going down to the East End Street men is part of what's being thought about. I guess what's difficult in the play now is if you play algae and jack as gay men who are in a relationship, to bump into two very big obstacles. One day, then after 10 minutes, they end up going to my guendaland, and I'm in my accessibility. And I remember that being a problem, I saw a production when I was in my early 20s, and it started off with algae and jacking bento-gets, and there were lovers. And that makes total sense for about 10 minutes. But then they go, isn't it great, we're marrying girls? And there was no problem with that. And then the rest of the play didn't make any sense to all, because they were clearly gay men in a relationship and they loved each other. And then A, they went off to marry girls, and then B, they turned out to be brothers in the end. So you were dealing with incest, and that that's really not sexy at all. No. So there's a sort of difficulty about half-fighting, and you can push it. But clearly Oscar Wilde's personal double life is feeling into you, and understanding of what that double life is. Yes, it's great point you make. There are two possible ways to interpret this, I think. The one who has that marriage could just be a cover. Yeah. But there's also, I think, the deeper thing being suggested, which I think you bring out, really, in your production, which is that there may be an ambiguity to people's sexual identity. And Wilde's making a more serious point about this, and suggesting that we can be more than one thing simultaneously. More than one thing can be simultaneously true, such as sexual interests can be fluid. So the men's sexual identity could be fluid in that sense. Exactly. And so I actually think current understandings agenda, are in a weird way, it's easier for us to understand 19th century understandings agenda, because this very binary gay or straight, which was certainly kind of how I was brought up, and how I saw the production in the late '90s, which was so difficult, because they were gay men and then they were in straight relationships, that a broader and wider and more mainstream understanding of sexual fluidity, actually weirdly, might map onto 19th century understanding of sex easier than a late 20th century binary thing. Absolutely. And as I say, I think this aligns with Wilde's philosophy more generally, that simultaneous things can be true, the trivial can be serious, and throughout what are truly or marks are actually containing serious points, that our opinions can be inconsistent and contradictory. I think, you know, Al Jannon, and they're just all over the place, what they believe and say, that people's identities and behaviors can be both good and bad. So he challenges this notion, I think, of a single fixed reality or laws for life, clearly. I mean, I think Al J says somewhere, the truth is rarely pure, a never simple, modern life would be very tedious if it were either. So I think that's a truism that Wilde feels is important. Yeah, I think that's the absolute heart of the Wilde's philosophy, which is that we don't have an essential, immutable self that is ultimately one thing. That we are actually a bunch of surfaces, and that those surfaces are constantly shimmering and changing and not to be packaged up into a completely coherent identity that makes absolute integrated sense. And the way that's from 19th century romantic, perhaps one like, what's the core of my heart? What's what words worth trying to really find? And I guess Wilde's suggesting is that there isn't such a thing as a core. All there is is what we do and how we behave and our thoughts are contradictory. And in that sense, that's a very, very modern understanding. And for the soft core terms, we call that poststructuralists, but there isn't a kind of re-touric center that the whole thing kind of floats. And that's both fun because it means that you can change your mind and you can get up to all sorts of stuff and you can have a nice time. I guess it's also freeing because it means that we don't get put in boxes by our identity and that our identity is essentially a construct. It's not that like being gay or straight, being black or white is a kind of totally immutable thing that was given to us by God and the meaning of that is imposed and unchangeable. It's actually a thing that has some flexibility within it. It has the possibility for change, it has the possibility for development, it has the possibility for freedom of how we want to understand and interpret that, not to be held by these categories that never change and put in these boxes that don't move. And all of that is set against social expectation and conventional morality, of course. So there's a challenge throughout to that in the way these men in particular want to live their lives, counter to that. It kind of shows you that that Victorian morality is a bit like the same as manners. So I think one of the most defining moments of the play is when Gwendolyn really, really doesn't want sugar in her tea and Cessery puts. that enormous amount of sugar in her tea and Grendlin is absolutely horrified because the sugar in her tea, and it's a kind of deep moral assault. And of course, it's a joke and it's a funny scene and the point of it is that it's funny. But the object of the satire is that people are taking how much sugar be put into seriously that it's kind of become this big moral question and it's absolutely ridiculous. And the idea that these things change doesn't really matter and it's just nonsense. It's not an important thing. And so if you take how much sugar be put into seriously, you then come to realize that a lot of ethics, a lot of rules, a lot of morals. Our as arbitrary as tea and sugar as arbitrary as cake and bread and batter, they're just sort of social constructs. And if they're social constructs, you can choose, it doesn't think they can't have real damage to people, but they're not unquestionable. They're not written in stone tablets by God. They're made by humans and they should be given as much attention as whether we have bread or batter or cake. - Absolutely, I mean, it's after I just, a lot of that in terms of social convention, you talked about Jack's house is on the wrong side of Velgrave Square, but that could be changed, whether you're wearing your chin high this year or not. - Exactly. - It's all about fashion and how fickle that can be. - Yeah. - Talking about the plot, back to the structure of the plot. I mean, one of the things you'd map to admire, hugely about the play, Max, is that it's got the precision of a farce. - Yes. - There's fantastic scenes where, you know, Algonon's plan to impersonate Jack's brother, Ernest and he visits Cecilie in the country, justice stir things up. And at that very moment, Jack arrives in mourning for the death of his brother. - Yes. - And you talked about the scenes at the tea table, they have that social satirical element. There's two consecutive scenes like that, where first the two women have this argument heatedly. While observing the etiquette of taking tea, as he said, and then the two men do the same. And both behave in a completely childish way, squabbling over the cake and muffins, and the point is the childishness of all those things. But also going back to your point about the queerness built into the structure, why do they marry? You know, Algie says he's gonna declare Bumbry dead and Jack the same. He's gonna declare Ernest dead. Is that they have to somehow deny that side of themselves to enter into the heterosexual relationships of marriage. And yet they don't have to in the end, as you said earlier, they'd never pay the price. I think you get a sense, but they don't have to change. And your production in particular, which suggests that actually they're all just gonna carry on in some way or rather. - Well, exactly. So at the very end, Gwendolyn says, I never changed except in my affections. And then Sethli says, what a mable nature you have. (laughs) And the guys have a similar conversation. And so at the very end, even as they're leaping into same sex couples, they both talk about other partners or different partners. And so in the text at the very least, they're talking about it being in open relationships at the end of the play. I mean, where does that open this include same sex relationships as not something that texts discusses, but that's what we're trying to imply lightly in our production. - Yeah, well, in the text, Gwendolyn says somewhere very early on that she intends to develop in many directions. And I thought that was quite nice. And then she says, I may marry someone else and marry often. - Exactly. - So you really get this sense of sexual impulse that the currents are not running very far below the surface with the women as well. They have independent desires. I mean, Gwendolyn talks about the vibration she feels. - Yeah. - Which is played up in your production, as well as the suggestion of the potential relationships are interests between the two women. - Yes. I mean, I think it's true because the potential sexual attraction between the two women is potentially latent in the text, but I think probably isn't in Oscar the original text. But I think the frist on between the men and then flirting with them, and certainly understanding a bunch of queer jokes between them is definitely in the text. I guess in my head, it was a better story. So if two gay men marry two straight women, that's a tragedy, especially if it's not scarce. Of course, that happens a lot in the 19th century that was where Lauren the Marriages was a thing. And this is a very beautiful book by Tom Cruise, recently called The New Life, about the two men who wrote the first book on homosexuality in the English language, or the first published book. Which was really helpful in the entry of that as well. I recommend it The New Life by Tom Cruise. That's a story of pain and suffering and not being able to be yourself. And of course, one of the brilliant things about the fun to being honest is it's almost entirely pain for you play. There's almost no trauma and there's a lot of backstory and there's very little interior suffering doing on. And so the story of two gay men marrying two straight women is hard because it's a tragedy and there's no place for that pain in the play. So I guess the story we're trying to tell is a four queer or bisexual young people who understand that about each other and that they marry in order to be able to have the freedoms that they want within their marriages in a Victorian society. - Absolutely right. And it's a step beyond the conventional romantic conclusion which we could all accept at face value. - Yes. - And has been for a hundred more years. But there are too many clues to suggest that it is hard to imagine that the amorous adventures of all these characters are over. - Well, I think it's really clear that they're not. The both of men and the women say it's not it's not the end of the play. It's not like here we are in heteronormative monogamy. - Yes. And then as you say, there's no pain. It's not a morality tale either where any of these people pay the price for their deceptions. It all turns out fine. - Everyone wins. Even Lady Blackwell who is in the sense the antagonist of these four young people. She gets what she wants. They will get married to rich people. The money stays in the right hands. You know, the story. - Yeah. (laughing) Well, now that you mentioned this, it's amazing that we've been talking for quite a while and have barely mentioned perhaps the most famous character in the play, Lady Braknell. At least famous for the role she offers the actor, particularly a challenge to delivering a fresh. Of course, the infamous line, a handbag, which I read described as the to be or not to be a theatrical comedy. So I don't know how you felt about that challenge. - I think it's a very hard challenge because it's three syllables. So it's not a huge amount that happens. I think Sharon's approach, which is brilliant, she's an extraordinary actor, and her approach is just to play the moment truthfully and not to try and like, particularly a thing about it. I think the expectation becomes a burden. And if you look at that old film of Edith Evans saying a handbag, she actually doesn't do anything particularly special with it anyway. She just says it quite nicely, quite truthfully. And I think that is probably the best approach. But no, Sharon's brilliant reimagining of Lady Braknell in a way that's very totally new, but also the person you be sort of know as well and the truthfulness of that is really wonderful, I think. And she's got a great facility with a language. And Wilde gives her these really, really difficult, long four-line sentences that end in a joke. And Sharon sails through to this such style in class. And they sound so wonderful in that accent. They sound a fresh and pure, and at the same time in a way that's really glorious. - It is. And actually also, of course, there's an important characterization of Lady Braknell as a focus, I suppose, in part of Wilde's social satire because there's a backstory hinted at, isn't there, to Lady Braknell? Tell us a bit about what that is about. - Well, the backstory of Lady Braknell is that she was born without very much money and that she married into it and that she's sort of paranoid in a way and that she's worried that she might lose class. And so I guess she too has a kind of surface. She's not like born to the man, she's some of his works her way up or married her way into that world. Like Of the Wilde did himself and therefore is both brilliantly of that world, but also an outsider and has sort of further to lose if it goes wrong. - Yes, and is, I guess preoccupied by the financials, for example, she says that she had no fortune of any kind when she married Lord Braknell. - Exactly. - So her origins are not what she now appears. And in fact, in the 2002 film, starring Judy Densch, there's a flashback suggesting that she was in fact a music-hole dancer when she met Lord Braknell. - Yes. - So you can imagine that whole backstory like that. So she has married up. And of course, there is through her much satire on marriage and marrying for social and financial advantage. - Yes, exactly. - Which she did. - Yes. - Now, I guess it was the custom, Lady Braknell says to Gwendolyn that when you do become engaged to someone, I or your father will inform you of the fact. And she's already compiled a list of candidates and of course, Jack's credentials by birth are not satisfactorily until they are as it turns out. And it is all about the money. But so that when Al-Janon declares an interested marrying Cecilie and Lady Braknell disapproves until she discovers that Cecilie is very rich. - Yes. And this play is a mixture actually from his powerful personal stage as a woman, which is great. And that in both the proposal scenes between the younger characters, it's the women leading as well. So women are running the show. And so that's also part of us, the wilds pushed back against the current society. I think it's a story about the women are in charge. - I was gonna mention that actually, that the women, there's very much a sense that they will easily be the match for the men in these marriages of not more. - Yes. - As you say, Gwendolyn directs the marriage proposal. And we talked about her developing in her own directions and Cecilie has the whole thing mapped out in her diary. So yeah, there's no doubt that they will continue in that form, I think. There's also stuff about money as well. We talked about marriage, but there's hints in the play about the costs that are born by these men in particular in living the lifestyle they do. - Yes. - The hints that they may be living beyond their means. And there was a note in the program, Max, where you talked about there being a fourth act, originally there was a mixture scenes that Wild wrote that were cut in the original production. - That's right. - What is that? all about. So while kind of lied about the writing of the play, so he said he'd written it in a guide last name, but actually he'd labored over it for several months during 9 or 10 really polished and detailed drafts of it. But the draft that was about to go into rehearsal with George Alexander the director was a four-act playing and George Alexander had been to see a half-hour curtain razor on Broadway that he wanted to do. So he told wild I want to do a half-hour warm-up before the importance of being honest. I guess in the way you might watch a short film now before a feature. So he needed it to be shorter. He needed it to be shorter to be told wild cut half an hour out of it and so wild compressed it from four acts which is a traditional 19th century comedy structure into three. The truth is that wild was an excellent editor of his own work and so it's better for the cut and although there were some good jokes as a last, there's only really one big extra soon in which Algie's got a debt collector coming and it's sort of weirdly a satire on his extra arrogance and also the threat of police coming to get someone who's bumbling but it's a sort of little instant that wraps itself up a bit too neatly and one of the things that wild actually did is he took a lot of the real world references out since he edited it to make it even more of a hot air balloon detached from the real world. So his editing was excellent so we've basically kept his editing but restored the four-act structure so that we get the interval in the middle of the first show. Okay great so you haven't put back in this scene with Mr. Grimstein. Yes, it's lawyer arrives in the country pursuing a debt that apparently Ernest Worthing has been rocking up at the Savoy Hotel. Again with hindsight you might be something foreshadowing of being arrested and taking out the prison which the lawyer threatens Ernest who is actually Alginon at this point again more confusion about who's who but now Wild himself described the play as a delicate bubble of fancy but he added and this is something we might guess we've been touching on it has its philosophy. What do you think that philosophy is? Well yes he then also when he was putting the plays together for publication even more than that the publisher said it's like a wonderful souffle isn't it? And Wild said yes but I'm almost rather it was like a pistol shot so he went one step further what is the pistol shot what is its philosophy? Life goes it starts off at the first week of taking serious things trivially and trivial things seriously but if you unpack that I guess what that really means is that manners and mores and social customs are essentially trivially in some ways and that things that box the same and things that lock us into restrictive ways of understanding the world and ourselves are constructed they're not given to us as absolute by God that's something that society and events and so that's a kind of philosophy of freedom I think. And the converse of that is that what should be taken seriously are things that people don't necessarily which is art and beauty and style he would propose is that not right? Yes yes I think so. And that's very much on display I think in Alginon's performance the way he lives his life his self-consciously flamboyant behavior and and it's it's almost performative in a sense and I thought there was a bit of a suggestion particularly in your production I guess where he embraces this kind of performative quality and it's a bit like Wild himself lived of course he embraced being a celebrity and it resonated I thought with our own time in social media for example where we create these public identities and Wild very consciously did this. Totally I think just as Wild put on your school wild show algae brilliantly formed by Shoe to Gat Wild puts on the algae show and that is a kind of performance of self that is material and constantly changing and witty and very hard to know what the true center is because maybe there isn't one maybe like wild suggesting everyone is just what they're doing in that particular moment and constantly able to change and transform which I think is very freeing and that's why it's such a good play it rather than anything else because identity is essentially theatrical identity is essentially a thing we perform rather than the thing we have deep deep in our core. Yes as it happens I just saw the invention of love Stoparts play last week. Yes. Where Wild is in fact a character and there's a line attributed him where it's reported in the press that he's paraded down Piccadilly in London carrying a lily and he says it's not whether I did it or not that's important but whether people believed I did it which again you know he was determined to be famous since a great line that jumped out at me that Sessley is recording in her diary and says it's simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions and consequently meant for publication. Yes. That sounded so today doesn't it? Well exactly they all like they're all live streaming their lives on Instagram I think is the movement of the movements of it. Yes exactly but then some serious points about the aesthetic life as in the estates that Wild set out principles about art talking about art for art sake as opposed to the mainstream Victorian view that literature and art should have an ethical purpose for example which I think you've touched on so the play is a statement of these principles as we said life imitates art as style not sincerity as essential Gwendolyn says so that sincerity I think as you describe it is this earnestness of the mores of the time of social constructs. Yes I think I agree with all that I just want to try and say it in a slightly more complicated way which is that art for art sake is an ethical project so I suppose if one's saying that the Victorian melodrama that deals with social issues like the fallen woman is actually not the best way to deal with social issues and that the way to get a little more freedom within society or way in which to create equality and justice I mean to his idea rather than necessarily the right way it's actually art the beauty itself will help do that and that will help liberate us and so that within art for art sake was an ethical project and that the more worthy let us champion social causes kind of campaigning art that isn't interesting beauty might not actually the best way of creating the society dreams of seeing beauty will liberate us as you say it it will it will be better he believed that these were the ideas that could define the way to live that Al-Janon lives by we should live as beautifully in dramatic lives it can because all the rest is just social masks are not truth back to what is true and what isn't true yeah I read a wonderful quote from Yates who said about wild that he lived in the enjoyment of his own spontaneity which aligns with what you've been saying about how it's nothing fixed and sought the fresh impulse of joy that sounds like a wonderful way to live the fresh impulse of joy yes I mean I guess that is what our amazing act is a challenge through every night and I think they're really successful when it really comes to life is when they feel the fresh impulse of joy yes absolutely when they had that ad lib as I talked up so earlier it was totally joyous they were living that yes but as he also touched on I mean all sorts of ways the play is subversive there's a woman when Jack says to Al-Janon that he always seems to want to argue about things to which he replies that is exactly what things are originally made for and this seems to be what he's doing a lot of the time Al-Janon is questioning challenging everything even if it's disguised in these perfectly phrased epigrams and I wanted to talk to you just briefly about the language in the play because we can't miss talking about how clever it is and how joyous that is some of the most quotable lines in drama of course like all women become like their mothers that is their tragedy no man does that's his an algae himself says that's perfectly phrased which of course it is but it's not just that is it the form in which Al-Janon and while challenged social orthodoxy is this epigram which are always constructed in dual constructions yes inverting the familiar to mean the opposite so we have for example divorces are made in heaven as opposed to marriages so the meanings are always inverted but sometimes you get carried away and I wonder whether you know the perfect symmetry the phrase or the thrill of its subversion is intoxicating but sometimes I wonder does it really make sense is it true or not it goes past you almost and thinking well that's great that's so clever that's beautiful does it really mean anything or is he just being clever well I think that's always been great debate with wild is it just inverting words to make it sound clever and it doesn't really mean anything or in the inversion of it are you somehow being asked to think about these two categories in matters of great important style not sincerity is the greatest thing and then I guess you start thinking about well either it's just sort of nonsense and it's like haha that's witty because it's my inversion or you start thinking about style and sincerity and you go well are they different are they opposing can you change them round which matters more if you can flip something on its head does that mean that it's sort of I don't know it can get your brain thinking about what these different categories are and are they really opposed in the way you think they are that's a great point because there was another line where you're saying lying the telling a beautiful untrue things is the proper aim of art is it really unplu things is the aim of art well as you say it's just a challenge think about it and as you said I mean Jack often says to algae all that's nonsense all that's nonsense you're always talking nonsense the line after talking nonsense really important so Jack says you never talk anything but nonsense and algae says nobody ever does so in a way one of the projects of wild is to show that all this moralizing talk is nonsense and so that if it's true one way round needs like marriages are made in heaven well then he also just say at the other way round the voices are made in heaven and so sort of goes for true and so anyway all this social judgey talk because you may as well just say the opposite in its source of funny and true too. It's all nonsense in a way. Both are true and both are untrue. Both are true and both are untrue and that's what I mean by you get to being with Beckett in a way because the moral certainty of Victorian England is suddenly stripped away and it's all nonsense and of course it's a joyful version of it rather than a kind of Beckett post-apocalyptic version of it but that's in a way what's happening it's like it shows if you can say the moral line goes way around. In a way it's all nonsense. If it's all nonsense we can tell the story of our lives and the way we want to sort of be free from it because we're liberated some more this judgment is just being language nonsense that we can play with becomes a game rather than something that constricts us. It is seductive the idea that the freedom and the joy and who would have thought we would get from this to Beckett but there is no question that there's just a celebration of life that you get from this play and it's challenged to any constraint on living so vitally as he says the vital importance of being earnest. I wanted to ask you about the ending actually that's last line. I guess you touched on it earlier about the different meanings of the word earnest in this context. Do you think there's some irony in this final statement because they aren't really none of these characters are really going to live an earnest life as we described. No so earnest one sense is Victorian sentimentality and that's the satire. It's the satire of being good and heterosexual and the nogamous and going to church on a Sunday and that kind of by the earnest Victorian oratorian is they call that kind of L-gar and Mendelsson sort of stuff that's very felt. In a way the surface line is fine there if we come a good proper Victorian man and I'm going to settle down and get church so that's like one bare of it of course because it's wild it's got another layer which is like I've also discovered the importance of being gay and being out and being fibrous and being true to myself and that the fiction I told about my double life has actually come true and I've now achieved liberation and the fact that both can be true at once seems very freeing I think. Absolutely yes wild is not a champion of an earnest life that sense of freedom is uplifting. The whole play seems to be a statement of the promotional alternative life to that prescribed by convention. But then a serious bumbreast one has a right to bumbre anyway one likes you know in a way that resans to me campaigning when she says that I'm sort of finding almost one moving and that in a way I think because the double meaning of the ending is simultaneous in coming out he's also being Victorian and sentimental and truthful so all the things it's not like their opposites so weirdly if you live an authentic life as a queer person then you are being earnest and truthful to yourself in a way and say that we're no longer torn between the Victorian church growing heterosexual world and your secret life you can be yourself in public and that's a different sort of earnestness that's a public truth that the players shooting at I think. Yes and in fact structurally as you say that goes back to the point originally that Jack was disguising this earnestness and now is able to say exactly declaring that truth yeah okay well yes we went some places I didn't expect there with Beckett it's that through but it was fabulous thank you Max before I let you go one of the traditions of the podcast I'd like to ask my guests to recommend another play that we might cover in the podcast or really one that's just a personal favorite is there something you might recommend to listeners or maybe it's something you're going to do next well weirdly I want to get back so this year I did the real thing by Tom Stoppard and I think one of the things I learned from doing the two plays back to back is how much Tom studied Oscar Wilde and there was a construction and sentence and epigram and wit and inversion and structural dexterity and the surface glitter with kind of deep emotional undercurrents that Stoppard gets from Oscar Wilde's writing so I think it would be exciting to read Arcadia or Rosencrantz and Gilden Stemeter ad or the real thing in the light of games the introduction of Gordon Spirionist and see how carefully Stoppard has read and done for Oscar Wilde. That's brilliant suggestion thank you it's strange actually this come together because I mentioned the invention of love yes and Stoppard of course did a lot of research into that period it's a he hasman but also wild features as a character and central to the all of that is the identity of a gay man in that time and we have that writ large here in importance of being earnest as well so thank you for that a great recommendation Stoppard one of our favorites and as I said we did the real thing very recently inspired by your production so thank you for that Max's fabulous production of the importance of being earnest continues at the national theater until the 25th of January it is a complete joy so try to go thank you Max for joining me it's great meeting you thanks for the production and congratulations on it as the curtain falls we are left with the joy of Wilde's artifice his effortlessly clever plotting his flawless wit and glittering aesthetic which in itself is designed to celebrate beauty and art but we can also be easily dazzled by the cleverness in the comedy that we don't notice how in every detail of his construction and language he is saying true and serious things it is a comedy for serious people I also can't help being struck by the extraordinary contrast between the dazzling energy and beauty that he conjures in his theatrical world and the reality of what happened to him in the real world thankfully the play survives as a beacon of beauty and free expression thanks for listening see you next time there are additional footnotes about this and every other play that we cover in the podcast available to our patrons patrons also enjoy early access to our sister podcast the play review in which Jody Rylet and I share our views on current productions on the London stage to become a patron please visit our website at theplaypodcast.com and don't forget to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts so as not to miss an episode thank you again for listening see you next time you