A brilliant escape in troubling times
The Importance of Being Earnest at PerthTheatre
Director Lu Kemp’s introduction in The Importance of Being Earnest programme opened with a prescient line: “Oscar Wilde’s brilliant and hilarious play is both what we all need in these troubling times -a comedy – and entirely relevant. It’s about a ruling class whose only worries are entirely self-created problems and who lie as a matter of habit.”
Let’s concentrate on the first bit: I couldn’t agree more. What a wonderful tonic the bellyache laughter of this three-part play was - three delicious slices of absurdity, silly faces and wise cracks which were like the scrumptious, crustless cucumber sandwiches that Algernon could not resist gobbling up.
Our current problems – which sadly may deter large numbers from seeing this production you could certainly say are self-created if you consider society’s hunger for air flights and restless consumption. Lies? Well let’s not go there. Back to the show...
This is a story of two men pretending to be somebody they are not in order to fool females.
Grant O’Rourke as Algernon was a five-star casting choice. He embodied the self-pleasing cunning required for Wilde’s most blatant persuader. Daniel Cahill as the more understated character of Jack worked well as the (marginally) more morally-centred of the pair of pretenders.
Caroline Deyga was grand as the dominant Gwendolen and the easily distracted governess.
Amy Kennedy’s facial tics as the naive but unruly Cecily had everybody continually in stitches.
Karen Dunbar was a visual treat as Lady Bracknell but being a younger actress, I thought she was less believable playing the crabby old snob.
That Lu Kemp had made TIOBE a five-hander instead of seven-hander forced multiple part juggling into the mix, with Algie morphing into the vicar and the butler and back again. As the play careered towards its final tranche, the comic quick-changes necessary to make the character switches was so slapstick silly that realism ceased to matter.
Making TIOBE a Scottish-voiced production jarred a little as Wilde’s script is all about namedropping London locations and Home County town references. I think it would have worked better to have gone the whole hog and swapped in Scottish place names which the Perth audience could better identify with.
A nondescript set arguably focused attention not on Victorian table legs and drinks trays but on the dialogue itself, but why not have minimal black instead of a mild go at a bookshelf and a conservatory palm leaf?
There were countless comedic highlights and TIOBE was everything theatre is designed to be: a great escape.
I came away elated with the brilliance of the original writing and a big fan of each of the five actors. See it while you can and support Perth Theatre.
It was everything theatre is designed to be: a great escape