The Importance of Being Earnest

For the second time in 5 years, I find myself back in Australia for family health reasons. For someone who, as a rule, doesn't fly in aircraft, that's a lot of flying. But rules were made to be broken - and as an immigrant, some travel is just unavoidable, as the alternative is comes full-circle towards fascism. As with any strong positions, there should be room for exceptions, which prove the rule. So I'm here until the beginning of April, after which I expect to make my usual long journey through Australia, Indonesia, and Singapore, before finally catching the (almost) unavoidable second flight to Europe.

Being back in Australia is not without its frictions for me, as the country has become decidedly harder-edged (from a pretty high base) even since I left in 2013. But there are joys too - old friends, old places, memories when I was more bored but more financially stable,  and the endless joys of nature (albeit going up in flames, but more on this later).

I will try to write a little while I'm here, but it's a complex time and I wouldn't say I'm in touch with anything that is happening culturally in Melbourne. Still, some opportunities may come up, and it's an interesting challenge for someone used to enjoying to barriers of distance to write in situations that feel uncomfortably close to home. The luxury of foreignness I have as a critic is thoroughly removed, here, to the point where I am dragged kicking and screaming into old paradigms that I don't care about.

But we all have to make our negotiations, don't we?

After the jump, a short analysis of Ridiculusmus' The Importance of Being Earnest, where I was unexpectedly present for the opening at Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre.

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The Importance of Being Earnest

Oscar Wilde is nothing if not contrary. A relentless outsider/insider figure, tossing barbs at the aristocratic system while participating in it with over-enthusiasm. Contrary to popular opinion, it seems to me that Wilde’s writing has always contained a feeling of loneliness – as though his domination of the arts through cleverness and wit is only ever over-compensating for a tragic and frightened misfit. Far from a detraction, this observation, coupled with the knowledge that a good portion of the end of his life was spent in jail for the ‘crime’ of “gross indecency” relating to homosexuality,  lends his writing a universal type of sadness, one which reaches over even the blistering bite of his satire.

 Photo: Zan Wimberley

These qualities are particularly hard to spot among the confidence of The Importance of Being Earnest: a Trivial Comedy for Serious People, Wilde’s most famous and over-produced play, known for its symmetrical structures, mirroring and acidic, playful teasing of the English upper-classes. It’s an experiment in contradiction, containing all of Wilde’s brutal critique and enthusiastic participation, presented to the audience on a platter with a smile. The suggestion is, “this is poisonous. But you will enjoy it.”

And enjoy, it audiences commonly do. This version, from UK-Australian duo Ridiculusmus (David Woods and Jon Haynes), is very much a ‘poor theatre’ take on the play, with the two actors playing all of the roles. It’s a conceit that works to highlight Wilde’s incessant doubling throughout the play – the insistence on monogamous match-making substituting for romance, the duality of city/country, the two butlers… the list goes on. The concept of ‘Bunburying’, central to the play’s theme of facades, contains its own duality, as the characters make up second versions of themselves in order to secretly fulfill otherwise unfulfillable desires.

Watching the actors swap through the different roles, however, questions arise. This is a remount of a 2006 production, again in the Malthouse theatre. It would be easy to produce a ‘then and now’ comparison, talking about how times have changed, how some of the more misogynistic lines from Wilde seem to carry a painful resonance, how the relentless performance of the gender binary may be itself equally painful. But it’s worth questioning if, even in 2006, this was a significant departure from other versions of the play – and in which case, why perform it in the first place, let alone remount it?

The key missing component from the Ridiculusmus remount would seem to be the pure acidity of Wilde’s critique, and indeed, his sadness. In both instances, their elimination from the play means that some of his nastier lines now gain their own tragic weight – “the only way to treat a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain” is a line that is audaciously misogynistic. Its justification for the writer hinges on who the target is: is it the superficiality of the aristocratic characters, and their facades masking hopeless inadequacy? Or, in a more ‘earnest’ interpretation – is the line openly anti-women? Wilde is far from pure, and wouldn’t be the first homosexual man to be guilty of – and get away with – breath-taking acts of misogyny. If we are to accept this kind of line, it hinges on its capacity to be read as rendering explicit a pre-exiting violence, with the unavoidable veil of critique creating discomfort in an audience filled with a type of painful recognition.

And here, Ridiculusmus run into certain problems with their interpretation, where the two-man performance risks turning the play into a certain type of circle-jerk. Indeed, their explicit performance of masturbation and sex with a minor, inferred in the play and brought out here – only seem to reinforce the feeling of the play as a performance of male power, maybe akin to seeing the gender-swapping performed in Shakespeare in the 1600s. An exception to this is David Wood’s characterisation of Cecily, where a supposedly chaste and pure young girl is played for all of her slutty and whimsical tendencies in a manner that achieves something close to transgression. Yet Wilde’s own defences of satire and irony are simply not re-employed with any gusto or contemporary resonance here, in a performance where the objective is really one of audience pleasure.

 

But more’s the point, Wilde’s own relentless self-critique – assaulting the English upper-classes of which he was at once an enthusiastic participant – seems to be a lesson unlearned. What role do these two British-born lads occupy in bringing the crowd-pleasing version to Australia, recreating in effect a ‘silly’ Earnest, one that creates a space for playfulness, inventiveness, and fun? Where do they position themselves in relation to Wilde, in relation to the play? As Wilde understood, pleasure is far from a neutral quality, and recreating the play in this way for an audience today legitimates little more than an escape from dark times, into a reinforcement of comfortable tropes. You might say audiences need that – that among a world of bushfires and sexual assault, it pays to have a little levity on the stage. Then again, add a linguistic flourish and such a statement could easily be transformed into one of Wilde’s own lines, where the bravado of the actors and chortles of audience are flipped into the target of the joke – accused of forgetting the resonances of the play in the outside world, and lacking in their own self-reflection.

But it’s possible to have pleasure and radical re-readings, isn’t it? My conclusion is one that resonates beyond this performance and directly to the play itself, which, with its insistence on gender binary, heterosexual marriage, and aristocratic rigidity, is surely crying out for radical reinterpretation by non-cis or radical feminist groups, who might make use of the re-utterances of a system of gendered violence in quite a different way. That’s not the play I got today, and Ridiculusmus have succeeded on their own terms, of an enjoyable and comic turn for a classic theatre text, albeit one which seems to stifle much of the discomfort Wilde was – and may still be – able to produce.

The Importance of Being Earnest
 by Oscar Wilde

with Jon Haynes and David Woods
Adapted by Jon Haynes, Jude Kelly and David Woods
Set and Costume Design: Zöe Atkinson
Original direction: Jude Kelly 
Producer: Erin Milne, Bureau of Works

Until March 8