The Importance of Being Earnest (Oscar Wilde)
Since I have a habit of reading plays people frequently assume I have a stronger base in the classics than I actually do. While I am more than ready to leave them that misconception, it does lead to problems if I’m ever put to the test.
Despite it’s ubiquity in classrooms and its enduring legacy as an hysterical play, it wasn’t until today that I had ever actually read The Importance of Being Earnest. Sure, I’d seen parts of it performed in acting classes, read some scenes during various theater classes, even watched part of the film adaptation during one theater history class so long ago, but never gone from start to finish experiencing it the way the author intended (read on a computer screen during breaks from work.)
It was fine. Good, even.
That’s glib of course; it’s a feat to remain known at all, and a double feat to maintain any sense of humor being transported both over time and space, but there was a part of me that hoped for more than I got.
Like A Girl’s Guide to Chaos, Earnest is mostly a vehicle for Wilde’s authorial voice which leaves many of the characters with little distinction: they make similar jokes, in a similar way, and many have similar attitudes on the same subjects. And it’s funny, it is, but Wilde has a bag of tricks that I’ve seen before (I’ve read other things by him, just not this one,) and he employs it frequently: express one thing, then express the opposite; attribute a bad habit to a class/profession of people; defend a vice as if it were a virtue. Many of the jokes would work the same if you kept the sentiment and changed the nouns, moments of genuine brilliance are diminished and diluted when repeated later on: it’s good, I liked it, I’d watch it, but I was hoping for more.
For anyone like me who hasn’t read it, you may trust that cultural osmosis has given you a lot of the plot, either through direct parody or by simply knowing how a story works, but for those who don’t: we’re introduced to Algernon and Jack, two people who throw witty barbs at each other. Jack wants to marry Algy’s cousin, Gwendolyn, but in short order we realize her mother won’t give her permission because of Jack’s uncertain lineage.
Jack, meanwhile, lets Algy know that he has a ward out in the country and a scheme to move about as he wishes by claiming that his younger brother Earnest (who Algy and everyone in the city knows Jack as) is getting up to scampy behavior all over the place.
Naturally Algy gets it in his head to go visit the ward, Cecily, masquerading as Ernest, and it turns out there’s an epidemic of women wanting to marry men named Earnest, so Jack and Algy need to solve their various problems, pose as Earnest, etc. until all the marriages are arranged satisfactorily.
We don’t really go to farces for novel plots, and this one does its job. I can see why it survived, (everyone should see the Boiling Point Productions version of it in Houston February 2023!) but I can’t help feel like Jack in the play: I’m tired of everyone being clever all the time, and this play is a cup of tea with a bit too much sugar for my taste.
