Still going Wilde over this classic

Mention The Importance of Being Earnest and one of the brightest jewels in the crown of British theatre springs to mind.

For Oscar Wilde’s dazzling masterpiece has been diverting and entertaining audiences for most of the 123 years since it was written.

While it’s always billed as a ‘hilarious comedy’, there is no slapstick and very little physical action in the play.

One exception is in the tense scene between the two female leads, when one deliberately fills the other’s cup of tea full of sugar.

In this happy and heartwarming production by Mask Theatre, Joanna Scott made a neat job of this as the not entirely innocent Cecily. While as the formidable Gwendolen, Sam Baker was appropriately wrathful.

Immediately after the girls’ scene, the two male leads are found squabbling over a plate of muffins in another rare piece of farcical business. Here, Matt Robertson as Algernon displayed the carefree suavity his part demands. Whereas Luke Day stressed Jack’s gravitas, the ‘earnest’ quality that both girls find so irresistible.

But, if Wilde doesn’t use traditional farce routines to get his laughs then why do the chuckles and chortles flow so freely?

I’d suggest the answer is by continually flouting our expectations. For instance, you expect to hear ‘her hair has turned quite grey from grief.’ But Algernon actually says, ‘her hair has turned quite gold from grief.’

A similar example occurs when Lady Bracknell comments ‘to lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune,’ and we expect her to continue, ‘to lose both is a tragedy.’ But actually she says, ‘to lose both looks like carelessness.’ In this classic role Suzanne Tuck took great pains with diction and projection, perfectly delivering some of the best lines ever written for a mature actress.

In this welter of upset expectations the audience soon begins to find humour in everything. There is nothing intrinsically funny about lines like ‘No cucumbers!’ ‘No, sir, not even for ready money.’ Or ‘Rise, sir, from this semi-recumbent posture.’ Or, most famously, ‘A haaand-baaag!’

But when Lady Bracknell talks about her daughter marrying ‘into a cloakroom’ and forming ‘an alliance with a parcel,’ we know that we’ve entered into the realms of pure fantasy. As absurd as Edward Lear’s limericks, as nonsensical as a P. G. Wodehouse novel.

In fact Wilde’s language is so intoxicating that almost everything becomes a joke. So that Jan Wright and Terry Toyne as Miss Prism and Canon Chasuble needn’t have worked quite so hard to add extra fizz to a comedy which is already bubbling over.