The Importance of being Earnest

Dear Sir nun non, (the origin of your nom-de-plume interests me) First let me apologise for responding to your critique in the first place. I was on a high after Fri and Sat nights' uproarious laughter and applause, being cheered as we entered the foyer on Saturday night, and it was a shock and a major deflationary moment reading your response on Sunday evening. I reacted to what I perceived as your belittling of our efforts into nothing more than a series of cheap gags. At the time I had no idea who cerunnon was, and in point of fact I object to the use of nom-de-plumes on this or any other site of correspondence, as they can become a license for abuse, and a whole play has been written about that. Not that I'm suggesting what YOU wrote was abusive, just forthrightly negative. I subsequently learnt, later the same evening in fact, who you are, and that we have met albeit briefly. It has been suggested we have more in common than the obvious, and may quite like each other if we came to know each other. Your reply above is moderate, and in person, if the opportunity arises, I will discuss with you the importance of action and reaction in comedy, that every line can't be played for a laugh, because most often the reaction is what gives the audience its trigger, and then only if the individual character journey's are clear. Sometimes an individual line is funny on its own, but most often its the reaction to a line that is a trigger for a laugh. But leave that for a face to face discussion. Regarding you comment ***I'm happy that you feel you all played Earnest in a way true to a farce. I just don't think that's the best reading of the text. For me it works best as a satire of the comedies of manners, particularly those of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. Without descending in to a semantic argument, I don't think that farce is the style Wilde wrote in. You do. Fine. I think what I saw was more like a sitcom, which is certainly derivative of farce.*** I believe that this play will still be played in 300 years, by which time it will be as old a text as Hamlet is now. Why do I think this? Because the characters are archetypes we recognise in our own society. The dress we don't. The language is highfalutin'. The social mores unfamiliar. The sexual politics of the 1890's unknown by the vast majority of a contemporary audience. But they still laugh. And still will in 300 years in my opinion. So what are they laughing at? I think, at the unfolding relationships between these archetypal characters placed in Wilde's absurd situation. I agree that Wilde wrote a satire, a very funny satire OF HIS TIMES. I politely suggest that as Wilde wrote this play in the LATE 19th century (1890's), he was unlikely to be satirizing plays written in 'the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century'. He had bigger fish to fry, satirizing the worst excesses of the people living immediately around him. It took a world war and 20's jazz to finally dismantle the society Wilde ridiculed in Earnest. It seems to me Wilde's satire is earnestly directed at the class structure of his England ('did he rise from the ranks of the aristocracy, or was he born into the purple of commerce', 'he has nothing but his debts to depend upon') and the sexual politics of his time ('why should there be one law for men and another for women'). Algernon and Jack's sexuality is never directly referenced, but I'm sure the homosexual's of Wilde's time read a lot between the lines. I certainly cannot imagine an Earnest in modern dress. It will in my opinion, always be most successfully played set in its period. Its internal references are peculiar to its moment in history. And now to the nub of my argument. Surely a satire only remains a satire, if an audience understands the underlying situation being satirized. To my mind, Wilde's play cannot any longer play as a satire because it has no relevance in satirizing our modern socio-economic existence. For a modern audience, surely the focus is on the dysfunctional attitudes of one character toward another, dependent on self conceited notions of their status in society. That remains playable, and is I believe played to the hilt in our production. To my mind, it is Jack's job in the play to be the everyman who reacts to, and thereby reveals, the ridiculous conceits of those around him. Yes, he is just as conceited as the rest, but somewhat more earnest in his endeavours to navigate a just and fair life ('who has a right to cast a stone against one who has suffered'). So in my humble opinion, to say that Earnest 'works best as a satire of the comedies of manners', or anything else for that matter, asks far too much of a modern audience. Certainly the majority wouldn't know a comedy of manners if they fell over one. But they know what they like. yours, Dan PS I'm an entertainer, which requires craft, not art.