The Importance of Being Earnest

• 1. Introduction

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  The Importance of Being Earnest had its first performance on the 14th of February 1895 at the St James's Theatre in London, a night that Allan Aynesworth, who played Algernon Moncrieff, would later call the greatest triumph in his fifty-three years of acting. The audience rose from their seats and cheered again and again. Oscar Wilde stood among them wearing a green carnation in his lapel, dressed, by one account, in "florid sobriety". He had just watched the culmination of his career as a playwright. Within weeks, he would be ruined.

  The play that set off that ovation is a farce about two young men who lead double lives to escape unwanted social obligations. Both of them, independently, have assumed the identity of a fictional man named Ernest. The women they love have each declared they could never love a man by any other name. Lady Bracknell, the formidable mother of one of those women, interviews a prospective son-in-law and rejects him because he was found as a baby in a handbag at Victoria Station. The subtitle Wilde eventually settled on was "a Trivial Comedy for Serious People".

  Why does a play so deliberately lightweight sit, more than a century after that premiere, beside Hamlet as one of the most quoted works in the English language? And what was Wilde really writing about, beneath the cucumber sandwiches and the impeccable epigrams? Those are the questions this documentary will try to answer.

• 2. From Worthing to the Stage

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  Wilde spent the summer of 1894 with his family at Worthing, on the Sussex coast, and it was there that the play began to take shape. His first draft ran so long it filled four exercise books. He revised it through the summer, changing the subtitle from "a Serious Comedy for Trivial People" to its now-familiar inversion, and renaming characters along the way: Lady Brancaster became Lady Bracknell, Algernon Montford became Algernon Moncrieff.

  Wilde scholars broadly agree that the single most important influence on the play was W. S. Gilbert's 1877 farce Engaged. From it, Wilde borrowed not just several incidents but what Russell Jackson, writing in his 1980 introduction to the play, called "the gravity of tone demanded by Gilbert of his actors". That deadpan delivery, applied to outright absurdity, is the engine the play runs on.

  Wilde wrote the part of John Worthing with the actor-manager Charles Wyndham in mind, sharing Bernard Shaw's view that Wyndham was the ideal comedy actor. Wyndham accepted the play for his own theatre. But in early 1895 George Alexander's production of Henry James's Guy Domville failed after 31 performances, leaving Alexander at the St James's Theatre urgently in need of a replacement. Wyndham waived his contractual rights and let Alexander take the play.

  Alexander then asked Wilde to shorten the work from four acts to three. Wilde complied, combining elements of the second and third acts. The largest cut was the removal of Mr Gribsby, a solicitor who arrives from London to serve a writ on the supposed Ernest Worthing for unpaid dining bills at the Savoy Hotel. Wilde was philosophical about the trimming, remarking that he remembered writing a similar play himself, and that it had been even more brilliant.

• 3. Valentine's Night, 1895

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  On Valentine's Day 1895, the Marquess of Queensberry arrived at the St James's Theatre carrying a bouquet of rotten vegetables. His son, Lord Alfred Douglas, was Wilde's lover, and Queensberry intended to throw the bouquet at the playwright when he took his bow. Wilde had been forewarned. George Alexander cancelled Queensberry's ticket, and the police were instructed to bar him from entering. Queensberry prowled around the theatre for three hours, then left his bouquet at the entrance. Wilde wrote to Douglas that his father had "arrived with a prize fighter" and departed "chattering like a monstrous ape".

  The premiere was preceded by a curtain-raiser, a short comedy called In the Season by Langdon E. Mitchell. During most of the month-long rehearsal period Wilde had been on holiday in Algeria with Douglas, returning just in time for the dress rehearsal on the 12th of February.

  The theatrical newspaper The Era reported that the play met with enthusiastic and unanimous approval and predicted a long and prosperous run. Aynesworth was described as debonair and stylish. Alexander, playing Jack Worthing, was praised for performing the part with entire seriousness and no indication of purposed irony. The Morning Post declared that Irene Vanbrugh and Evelyn Millard caught the required Gilbertian tone perfectly.

  Queensberry kept pressing his campaign against Wilde after the premiere. Within weeks Wilde launched a private prosecution against him for criminal libel. That decision triggered a series of trials from March to May 1895, which revealed Wilde's homosexual private life and ended in his conviction and imprisonment for gross indecency. The Victorian public turned against him almost immediately. Box-office receipts fell. Alexander tried to save the production by removing the author's name from the playbills, but the play closed on the 8th of May after 83 performances.

• 4. Triviality as Philosophy

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  Wilde told his friend Robbie Ross that the play's underlying theme was "That we should treat all trivial things in life very seriously, and all serious things of life with a sincere and studied triviality". Algernon gives a version of that idea in Act II, declaring that one must be serious about something in order to have any amusement in life, then reproaching Jack for being serious about everything and thus revealing a trivial nature.

  The critic Arthur Ransome argued that the play was the most trivial of Wilde's society comedies and the only one that produces what Ransome called "that peculiar exhilaration of the spirit by which we recognise the beautiful". Where Salome and An Ideal Husband had dwelt on serious wrongdoing, vice in Earnest is represented, as Ransome saw it, by Algernon's greedy consumption of cucumber sandwiches. The duplicity that haunts Dorian Gray and Sir Robert Chiltern in An Ideal Husband has a darker character; Algernon's Bunburying and Worthing's double identity as Jack and Ernest are largely strategies for avoiding unwelcome social obligations.

  Ransome also identified what he saw as Wilde's structural breakthrough: by abandoning melodrama and basing the story entirely on the Earnest/Ernest verbal conceit, Wilde freed himself from the need to live up to any drama more serious than conversation. The academic Sos Eltis, examining Wilde's manuscripts, found that while his earliest handwritten drafts are full of farcical accidents and broad puns, the revisions gradually transformed standard nonsense into what she described as "the more systematic and disconcerting illogicality which characterizes Earnest's dialogue".

  W. H. Auden, in 1963, called the play "a pure verbal opera". Mary McCarthy, writing in Sights and Spectacles in 1959, found it both extremely funny and "a ferocious idyll", with depravity as the hero and the only real character.

• 5. Satire Dressed as Nonsense

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  In Victorian England, earnestness was not just a personality trait. Originating in religious movements aimed at reforming the lower classes, it had spread through the middle and upper classes across the mid-19th century as something close to the overriding social value. Wilde's play mocks that earnestness at every turn.

  Gwendolen declares in Act I that "the only really safe name is Ernest". Cecily in Act II pities any married woman whose husband is not called Ernest. Both women are placing their entire faith in a forename over everything else their prospective husbands might be. Lady Bracknell embodies the rituals of respectable society with an absolutism the Wilde scholar Peter Raby describes as creating a comic effect of assertion by restraint. She dismisses Jack's London address as being on the unfashionable side of Belgrave Square, and is unmoved by his explanation that the handbag in which he was found as a baby was deposited in the cloakroom of the socially superior half of Victoria Station.

  The play also parodies 19th-century melodrama directly. Jack arrives in full mourning for a brother who has just walked into his own house. Cecily and Gwendolen shift within moments from warm friendship to deep hostility on learning they are supposedly both engaged to the same man.

  Cecily says to the man she believes is the reprobate Ernest: "I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy". And in the final scene Jack asks Gwendolen whether she can forgive him for not having been deceitful after all. "I can," she says, "for I feel that you are sure to change".

• 6. The Name Ernest

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  The pun at the heart of the play, on the name Ernest and the adjective earnest, has generated debate ever since the premiere. In queer theory, the play's themes of duplicity and ambivalence are read as inextricably bound up with Wilde's homosexuality. After his release from prison Wilde wrote to Reginald Turner: "It was extraordinary reading the play over. How I used to toy with that tiger Life!"

  In 1990 Noel Annan suggested that the name Ernest may have functioned as a private code-word among gay men, in the same way that "Is he musical?" was thought to have been used. The suggestion has some circumstantial support: in 1892, two years before Wilde began writing the play, John Gambril Nicholson had published Love in Earnest, a book of pederastic poetry, with a sonnet entitled "Of Boys' Names".

  The actor Sir Donald Sinden, who had met Lord Alfred Douglas and two members of the original cast, Irene Vanbrugh and Allan Aynesworth, wrote to The Times in 2001 to rebut that interpretation. He recorded that none of them had ever hinted at any sexual connotation for the word. Consulting Sir John Gielgud, whose own portrayal of Jack Worthing was considered legendary, Sinden received a firm response: "No-No! Nonsense, absolute nonsense: I would have known".

  The word "Bunbury" has its own set of competing theories. Bunbury is a village in Cheshire. One suggestion traces the name to a hypochondriacal acquaintance of Wilde's youth named Henry Shirley Bunbury. A separate theory holds that Wilde spotted the names of a Captain Bunbury and a magistrate named Bunbury in The Worthing Gazette in August and September 1894 and simply liked the sound. Aleister Crowley, who knew Wilde, put forward a third account involving a chance meeting on a train to Banbury and a subsequent rendezvous at Sunbury.

• 7. Revivals and Reinvention

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  After Wilde died in 1900 George Alexander revived the play at a small theatre in Notting Hill in December 1901, starring again as John Worthing, with the young Lilian Braithwaite as Cecily. The Manchester Guardian called it "a brilliant play". When Alexander brought it back to the St James's in 1902 the playbills credited it only as "By the Author of Lady Windermere's Fan". That revival ran for 52 performances. The 1909 revival at the St James's, with Alexander and Aynesworth in their original roles, ran for 316 performances.

  John Gielgud produced and starred in a production at the Globe Theatre in 1939 with Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell and Margaret Rutherford as Miss Prism. The Times called it the best production since the original. During a 1946 season at the Haymarket, the King and Queen attended a performance; the journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft later described it as giving the play "a final accolade of respectability". Gielgud took the production to Broadway in 1947.

  For Peter Hall's 1982 production at the National Theatre, the cast included Judi Dench as Lady Bracknell, Martin Jarvis as Jack, and Nigel Havers as Algernon. In 2014 at the Harold Pinter Theatre, Lucy Bailey directed an age-blind production in which the average age of the cast was nearly seventy, with Jarvis and Havers returning to the same roles they had played at the National more than thirty years earlier.

  The role of Lady Bracknell has several times been taken by men. Geoffrey Rush played her for the Melbourne Theatre Company in 2011, in the same year that Brian Bedford played her on Broadway in a revival based on the 2009 Stratford Shakespeare Festival production. The National Theatre's November 2024 revival by Max Webster was recast for a transfer to the Noel Coward Theatre in September 2025, with one cast featuring Stephen Fry as Lady Bracknell and Ncuti Gatwa as Algernon.

• 8. Afterlives

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  After his imprisonment Wilde spent two years at hard labour and then went into exile in Paris, sick and depressed. In 1898 Leonard Smithers agreed to publish the two final plays. Wilde proved a meticulous reviser in exile, sending detailed instructions on stage directions, character listings, and the book's presentation. He insisted that a playbill from the first performance be reproduced inside. His name did not appear on the cover: it stated only "By the Author of Lady Windermere's Fan". He would write no more comic or dramatic works. He told a correspondent, "I can write, but have lost the joy of writing".

  The pun in the title has given translators persistent trouble. In German the problem solves itself: ernst means serious and Ernst is a given name. French offers a close solution; Les Archives du spectacle records that the most common French title since 1954 has been L'Importance d'etre Constant. Italian translators have given the play several titles, including L'importanza di essere Franco, Severo, and Fedele, each built around a name that doubles as a virtue.

  The play has been filmed three times: by Anthony Asquith in 1952, with Edith Evans reprising Lady Bracknell; by Kurt Baker in 1992 using an all-black cast set in the United States; and by Oliver Parker in 2002 with Colin Firth, Rupert Everett, and Judi Dench. Parker's version restored the solicitor Mr Gribsby, the character Wilde cut before the premiere at Alexander's request.

  Gerald Barry's 2011 opera, commissioned jointly by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Barbican Centre in London, assigns the role of Lady Bracknell to a bass. Tom Stoppard's 1974 comedy Travesties builds its central character around Henry Carr, a real figure who played Algernon in a production of the play produced by James Joyce in Zurich in 1917. The critic Max Beerbohm had predicted as much, writing after the 1909 revival that the play was sure to become a classic of the English repertory and that its humour was as fresh then as when it had first been written.