The Importance of Being Earnest

American Airlines Theatre

New York

(212) 719-1300

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It’s great to see a performance that makes Oscar Wilde’s verbal jousting “feel fresh off the press,” said Scott Brown in New York. In this Canadian import, from the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, “each jewel of wit is polished apple-bright,” and every character, no matter how farcical his actions, is believable. The “uniformly brilliant cast” eagerly dives into the story about two Londoners who each pretend to be a fictitious man named Earnest while courting their sweethearts. This all happens under the disapproving gaze of one suitor’s potential mother-in-law—Lady Bracknell—a “towering icon” of Victorian propriety who’s played here by Brian Bedford, a Tony winner in drag.

“It’s not necessarily rare for actors—male actors, that is—to take on the role,” said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. The difference here is that Bedford, who also directs, plays the role for its intrinsic comedy, not to win laughs with “winking references to the gender switch.” Armed with a thousand different ways of sneering, Bedford delivers a performance “more buoyant and consistently funny than any I’ve seen.” By comparison, the banter between the suitors, played by Santino Fontana and David Furr, seems slightly labored at first. But not for long. The “intricate cadences of Wilde’s dialogue” eventually flow so smoothly that you can forget how stylized it is.

Everything in this Earnest is “colorful and over-the-top,” said Mark Kennedy in the Associated Press. Yet this “frothy comedy,” Wilde’s last play before he was “effectively” put on trial for his sexuality, also has the capacity to unsettle an audience. In its day, it subtly skewered “elite conceptions of truth and honesty,” including upper-crust views on homosexuality (“earnest” was a Victorian-era code word for gay.) Many of the play’s arrows still sting, especially in Bedford’s staging. While the show garners plenty of laughs, it proves that Wilde left us “a complex work” that will never grow obsolete.