The Importance of Being Earnest: Advanced York Notes

The Importance of Being Earnest was first staged at the St James's Theatre, London, on 14 February 1895. Like almost all contemporary theatres, the St James's had a proscenium arch stage. That is, the stage space was almost entirely behind a framed facade, so that if a room were depicted on the stage, as in Earnest's Act I and Act II , three of the walls were behind the facade, and the audience made up an imaginary fourth wall.

This was the stage which had developed for the playing of naturalistic drama, in which the audience was supposed to suspend its disbelief, and to enter into a pretence that what was enacted before them was real. In naturalistic drama, the imaginary fourth wall was impenetrable. Actors on the stage never disrupted the illusion of reality in which they participated by, for example, addressing the audience directly. The action took place as if no audience were present. The period in which Earnest was first performed was one in which naturalism was the dominant mode. Stage sets were elaborately realistic, with real furniture, and massive attention to detail. Costumes for contemporary drama were often ordered from London and Paris couturiers. Everything was set up to heighten the illusion of reality. The original staging of Oscar Wilde's play drew heavily on this tradition. The anonymous reviewer for The Stage of 21 February 1895 drew attention to just one of the effects:

• Many were struck with the realistic watering-pot carried by Miss Evelyn Millard [playing Cecily] in the Second Act. From the rose of this what looked like real water was distributed over the mimic garden. The water was merely silver sand. (Quoted in Jonathan Goodman, The Oscar Wilde File, 1988, pp. 31–2)

This is an interesting detail because, at first sight, it seems so unnecessary. Why not use real water? The answer is probably that the rose garden at Jack's country estate was made using silk flowers which would not have taken well to being really wet. An elaborate illusion was constructed to make artifice look like nature. The costumes and the sets were also made to look as real as possible. The original audiences, made up largely of middle- and upper-class theatre-goers, were looking at houses and gardens which closely resembled the ones they actually lived in – or houses and gardens in which they would have liked to live. The clothes on the stage were their clothes. The on-stage characters, therefore, were in some sense themselves. When they laughed at the ridiculous contortions of language and behaviour on the stage, they were also to some extent mocking their own morals and manners.

After Oscar Wilde's disgrace shortly after the opening of the play, all his West End runs were curtailed. The Importance of Being Earnest was the first of the plays to be rehabilitated, with several performances before the Great War. As time went on, however, it became increasingly clear that the play is quite specifically dated. The last professional 'modern-dress' performance, with the play set in contemporary London, was in 1923. Whilst the jokes in the play remain funny and fresh, the setting demands a world in which the trains run very frequently and on time, in which no-one has a car or a telephone, in which the upper classes routinely have large numbers of servants, where men wear detachable shirt cuffs, and in which women are closely chaperoned. Even in 1923, these things were no longer true. Since the 1920s then, the play has always therefore been staged as a period piece, set in a relatively innocent past, and apparently distanced from more modern concerns. Where the original audience saw itself – in modified but recognisable form – more recent audiences tend to view the play with nostalgia, and to see the satire as directed at a long-gone age. This does not mean, of course, that experimental staging is not possible. If Earnest always looked and sounded the same, it would not remain a popular play.

There have been notable experiments with drag casts, for example: Lady Bracknell and Miss Prism seem perfect figures to be played by men in women's clothing, and this kind of experiment accords well with the play's camp attitudes. Moreover, most British theatres built since the Second World War have apron stages, which jut out into the audience. Instead of the audience all sitting in front of the action as with a cinema screen, making up a 'fourth wall' to the action, the apron stage has the audience sitting on three sides of the action, with a backdrop making the fourth wall. Earnest has also been played 'in the round', where the stage is entirely surrounded by the audience. These alternative stagings have interesting effects on the relationship between the cast and the audience. Where in the proscenium arch theatre, the audience plays no part in the action since all attention is focused on the stage, in apron and in-the-round productions, members of the audience can see other members of the audience across the stage. Moreover, the cast and the audience are much closer to each other – there is no orchestra pit separating them. In more modern stagings, the illusion is laid bare. We are not asked to suspend our disbelief, to enter the illusory world of the stage; rather we are required to notice that it is an illusion. This is one of the places in which to seek a distinction between a naturalist and a modernist response to the play: is the illusion convincing, as in naturalist drama, or does the production draw attention to itself, as in a modernist response? Since the play is largely about the complexity of the relationships between nature and artifice, reality and illusion, reality and appearance, modern stage formations help to point this message out when they explicitly involve the audience's responses.

I've suggested already that the language of the play is artificial and stylised. The same kinds of things might be said about its gestures and choreography. If the speeches have to spoken in a measured way, then perhaps movement should also be measured. Here, period costume helps. The clothes worn by women in particular in the 1890s were highly elaborate. Long skirts, leg o' mutton sleeves and corsetry all have their effect on the ways in which one is able to move. An actress (or actor) in a corset has to stand up very straight, and has also to think about her breathing since a corset presses on the diaphragm, making spontaneity almost hazardous. Formal clothes lead to formal speech and gesture. The play certainly cannot be staged with characters in informal costumes.

It is an explicit part of Algy's character that he is a dandy with an exaggerated interest in his own appearance. Gwendolen is very smart (Act I, p. 261). Compared to these two urban sophisticates, Jack and Cecily are supposed to look dowdy, but their plain dress is only plain relative to the splendour of their prospective spouses. Miss Prism may be sartorially challenged; but Lady Bracknell is most emphatically well-dressed. Costume provides the audience with visual clues to the meaning of character.

On the modern stage, sets for Earnest are seldom naturalistic. Very few props are needed to signal a room or a garden; light can be used to make distinctions between inside and outside locations. And if there is less to see on the stage, there is more emphasis on the cast. In modern minimal settings, the sense that the actors are playing characters who are themselves play-acting comes across very strongly, throwing up once again the issue of the illusory nature of the theatrical experience for the audience's consideration.