The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
The Importance of Being Earnest
Perth Theatre, March 5 – 21
“With the state of the nation and the climate at the moment, people are looking to have a laugh when they go out to have a good time,” says Lu Kemp, artistic director of Perth Theatre, who has chosen one of the most famous comedies of all time as her new directing project.
“The Importance of Being Earnest is an enduring comedy, and it’s really fun,” she says of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 classic of deliberately mistaken identity amid the English upper classes.
“Yet re-reading it I was surprised by how relevant it is to now. The joy of it, for me, is that it’s all about the ruling class barefaced lying and living double lives, and having no relationship to the worries of people who are not themselves.
“So their entire occupation is with the trivial. There’s something really rather beautiful about that. One of the great lines is, ‘my nephew, untruthful? Impossible! He is an Oxonian’.”
“You don’t have to press very hard to get some lovely contemporary resonances. We’ve lost any references that no longer have a contemporary meaning, but there were very few of them, actually,” she continues.
“This could be Made in Chelsea or Succession – one of the things that really influenced us was Pose, the American series, which is about people performing the versions of themselves that they want to be.
“That duplicity feels very current. It’s a similar idea to Catch Me If You Can, the (Steven Spielberg) film with Leonardo DiCaprio; people living in multiple different realities in order to get away with things.”
With one star in Wilde on the page, another has been secured for the stage.
Karen Dunbar, who is well-known to Scottish audiences for series like Chewin’ the Fat and The Karen Dunbar Show – and further afield for tours of The Vagina Monologues and Calendar Girls – will be bringing her great powers as a comedy performer to Perth in the role of the fierce matriarch Lady Bracknell.
“The piece is a farce, and we’re raising that farce partly because we have Karen, who’s a fantastic comic actress,” says Lu. “But she’s also a serious actor, which is interesting, because there aren’t that many actresses who cross over. She did Men Should Weep for the National Theatre in London, Shakespeare at the Donmar, and she played Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days at the Tron (in Glasgow) which was an extraordinary feat.
“So she’s got real muscle as a serious actress, and to bring those things together is joyous.”
In case Dunbar overshadows the rest of the performers, it’s worth mentioning that Outlander star Grant O’Rourke, Caroline Deyga, Amy Kennedy and Daniel Cahill make an extremely strong cast. “I want the audience to have a good time,” says Lu of her hopes for the show.
“I want them to have a really enjoyable evening which makes them laugh, but that they recognise things that make them slightly uncomfortable in that laughter. It’s a fun story about seeing people make really horrible messes, and then get themselves out of those horrible messes.” See tomorrow’s Weekend magazine for an interview with Karen Dunbar.