Audiobooks

Paul Keegan

The Importance of Being Earnest

Subtitled ‘A Trivial Comedy for Serious People’, and written, as Wilde remarked to Ada Leverson, ‘by a butterfly for butterflies’, The Importance of Being

Earnest is an intricate score, its close harmony suited to audiobook. The play is bottomlessly theatrical, but its singleness of effect is closer to a poem. Endlessly interesting to the ear, Auden called it ‘the only pure verbal opera in English’ (it has recently been made into an opera by the Irish composer Gerald Barry).

There are two notable recordings to choose between: the Radio 4 centenary production of 1995, with Judi Dench as Lady Bracknell, Miriam Margolyes as Miss Prism, and Jack Worthing played by Michael Sheen (who has also recorded a superb Crime and Punishment for audiobook, albeit abridged). The alternative is the 1951 radio recording with Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell and a youngish Gielgud as Jack Worthing – the Naxos version of which is the one to get (there are others available, of even poorer production quality). But despite its acoustic shortcomings this is a classic performance, a three-act game of shuttlecock in period dress, by turns languid and dazzlingly synchronised.

Dame Edith Evans became synonymous with Lady Bracknell, whom she played, remorselessly, from 1939 onwards, on stage and in film. She told her biographer, ‘I’ve played her everywhere except on ice and underwater.’ Evans is countered by Gielgud’s silken insouciance towards every unpleasant surprise, and his inimitable vocalise (‘Poouer Ernest!’), which makes Cecily sound like an island (‘Sicily’), and is consummately understretched, particularly under pressure.

The play was written in the autumn of 1894, at a time when Wilde desperately needed money, and debts, inheritances and bankruptcy courts are the play’s unconscious life. It is a self-sufficient but threatened world, with mention of revolutions, or the sinister contemporary obsession with heredity, or Freudian glimmerings: ‘All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.’ Or this exchange between Miss Prism and Cecily: ‘Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us.’ ‘Yes, but it usually chronicles the things that have never happened, and couldn’t possibly have happened.’ The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde had appeared a decade earlier, and Wilde added his own Irish eeriness to this new brew: ‘Most people are other people.’ The play is full of pairings, and everyone leads a double life, even Lady Bracknell (whose origins suddenly stand revealed: ‘When I married Lord Bracknell I had no fortune of any kind’).

But it is also Wilde’s dream play, of life lived as a continuous paradox, in other words as a work of art. In his great essay ‘The Decay of Lying’, art sides with lies, rather than with truth or illusion. As Gwendolen puts it, ‘In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing.’ Because sincerity breeds hypocrisies, and the only defence is to produce private truths, to face down the mannerism of manners, propriety and etiquette. There is a lot to be said for letting Wilde’s words convey the covert business of the play, which is what Gielgud and Evans are content to do.

Thus the recordings richly contradict each other. The 1995 production is more like a serious comedy for trivial people, delivers rapid fire and is more eager, with some dangerous lapses into naturalism (Jack and Algernon audibly bridling under provocation, for example). Judi Dench’s Lady Bracknell and her niece Gwendolen advance on the menfolk like synchronised killing machines – and Dench’s Bracknell is strikingly fresher in voice, sounding younger than her niece, and less glazed than Dame Edith. Where Lady Bracknell’s ‘Found?’ and ‘A handbag?’ were famously boomed out by Evans, they are whispered by Dench, in whom emotion invariably produces a lowering of temperature.

Miss Prism, as played by Miriam Margolyes, is tortured, hysterical, at a dotty and exquisite remove from reality, and commands all the ungovernability of proper minor characters: woe to any player of Hamlet faced by the Guildenstern of Miriam Margolyes. Meanwhile, between paradoxes, the men never stop eating (cucumber sandwiches, muffins, tea-cakes). Gielgud came to realise that the muffin-eating must be played slowly (Algernon: ‘I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them’). Both recordings make a good fist of talking while eating, especially in Act I, one of the most dazzling scenes of comic dialogue in the language, played by two men with their mouths full. But it is the 1951 recording that is the more suited to hearing rather than seeing, to the notion of voices without bodies which is the peculiar fiction of the audiobook. The grain of the voice is all.

Woolf or Eliot. However, what is striking about Hardy is the degree to which his literary mentality remained anchored in the 19th century. The poem that serves as Ford’s text for his final chapter, ‘The Woman I Met’, illustrates a point in this respect: although composed in 1918 and published in 1921, it is entirely 19thcentury in its conception (the ghost of a prostitute encountered under the gas-jets in a city crowd), much closer to Baudelaire than to Eliot, and much closer to Baudelaire than anything in Eliot. For all its characteristic anguish, there is nothing fractured or distracted in its expression: on the contrary, it exhibits the unbroken ‘spinal cord of thought’ that Larkin observed was the hallmark of even the slightest of Hardy poems. Yet Hardy is not just separated from his younger modernist contemporaries by literary technique, but by an ideological gulf: he is the last great exemplar of that flamboyant 19th-century pessimism one associates with a Leopardi or a Schopenhauer – those for whom the world was tarnished, but the mirror unbroken. Hatchards price: £18