The Importance of Being Earnest
by Oscar Wilde
The Importance of Being Earnest
by Oscar Wilde
Directed by Jeremy Lee Cudd
September 24-27 @ 7:30PM, September 28 @ 2PM
Russell Auditorium
Director’s Note
We are quite far away from 1895 London and the social circles Oscar Wilde is satirizing in the Importance of Being Earnest. For a contemporary audience it can feel simply like a light, farcical comedy about two young couples leveraging for consent to be married while wrestling with the integration of their single-life identities. A late-Victorian audience naturally brought their own societal rules and cultural baggage to the show and so would have strongly felt Wilde’s satirical sting. He creates a topsy-turvy version of their world full of inverted logic which tickles the funny bone while enhancing the sense of absurd arbitrariness to upper-class social rules. Our 21st-century American culture still has enough of a Victorian hangover to understand the interplay of money, class, and social status that characters like Lady Bracknell preside over. Bracknell maintains a list of eligible gentlemen to vet marriage-mergers between the old aristocracy and the newly rich. Just a small amount of research quickly exposes a related constellation of sophisticated social critiques and coded communications in Wilde’s text, but something about this play really started to ping with our contemporary culture when I came across a quote from Susan Laity’s essay, “The Soul of Man under Victoria: Iolanthe, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Bourgeois Drama.”
"Each character in the play is an aesthete, an artist of the personality, who devotes him or herself wholly to —him or herself."
These characters don’t have camera-phones, but they are living their lives almost as if they were being recorded — a “Victorian Selfie,” if you will. Their diary entries are a constructed fiction akin to the functional use of our social media accounts. We share Hot Takes instead of bon mots to raise our public profiles. The voluminous etiquette manuals of the 19th century have been replaced with TikTok feeds and IG Reels. Different medium, but the pressure to internalize and conform to the trends is the same. The absurd affectations of our new Influencer class trying to adapt the old Hollywood rules of celebrity, even as those rules crack and crumble, feels like a contemporary analogue for a vibe in this play. There is no shortage of what we might call Main Character Energy in the young lovers, but there is a delightful duality to its expression. Their heavily fictionalized identities become a way of hacking the Victorian rules, carving out a space for their individual freedom while they seek to enter into approved marriages. The lovers improvise with each other’s fictions as a courtship ritual, playfully negotiating power and autonomy. In these games of self-invention, Wilde showcases our universal capacity for both adaptability and self-delusion. I find the former to be thrillingly joyful, and the latter to be consistently hilarious.
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