The Importance Of Being Earnest (Wendy Hiller) part 10 of 11

"The Importance of Being Earnest" by Oscar Wilde

A 1985 TV broadcast featuring the formidable and hilarious Lady Bracknell by Dame Wendy Hiller.

link below to playlist of all 11 parts of this "The Importance Of Being Earnest":
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=749CF199F94D9B7F

Jeremy Clyde ... Algernon Moncrieff
Ann Thornton ... Cecily Cardew
Gabrielle Drake ... Gwendolen Fairfax
Sydney Arnold ... Merriman
Gary Bond ... John Worthing, JP
Rosamund Greenwood ... Miss Prism
Henry Moxon ... Rev Canon Chasuble

Directed by Michael Attenborough (stage) and Michael Lindsay-Hogg (TV)

This production was broadcasted on US television in 1985 (when I recorded in on this VHS tape), and that is the date given in several references, but it was originally produced in 1981.


The actor (and manager) Geroge Alexander first presented this play with a one act curtain raiser by Langdon Mitchell. Wilde had submitted a four-act play, and was told to cut it down to three acts. He complied and most of the cutting involved folding the second and third acts into one--the second act as exits today.

Wilde's son Vyvyan reconstructed the original 4-act version in 1957, (it survived in a German translation and from copies of Wilde's early drafts--and offered many more opportunities for the actors to eat on stage).

Some excellent stuff got cut! here's a bit:

Jack: Believe me, dear Cecily, I am acting for the best.

Cecily: People always say that when they do thier worst.

Jack: Child! Who taught you such a pessimistic idea?

Cecily: No one; if I had been taught it, I wouldn't believe it.

.......

Camille Paglia writes:

...we see that wilde's witticisms contain a wealth of unspuspected meaning. Even his apparently nonsensical 'boutades' are Late Romantic gestures. Lady Bracknell tries to terminate the stormy scene at the Manor House by declaring to Gwendolen, "Come, dear, we have already missed five, if not six, trains. To miss any more might expose us to comment upon the platform." I have read these lines a hundred times and never cease to marvel at their bizarre genius.

They have the air of lunatic certitude we know from Lewis Carroll, who I think strongly influenced Wilde. What is Lady Bracknell saying? Missing a train, even "five, if not six" (a Decandent precision), normally has only private and not public consequences. In the Looking-Glass world of form, however, failure to adhere to plan is an affront to natural law, bringing murmurs of complaint from passerby. But how do others learn of one's deviation from a train schedule? Since everything is visible in this landscape of externals and since the mental life of these androgynes, like their bodkes, has a glassy transparecy, their intentions must precede them, like a town crier, alerting the populace to their tardiness.

In its visionary materialism, "Importance of Being Earnest" reverts to the Homeric world of allegorized psychic phenomena, where enraged Achilles feels Athena tugging at his hair. If we analyzed Lady Bracknell's remark in naturalistic terms, we wold have to speak of a megalomaniacal paranoia. She imagines a general consciousness of their every move; everyone knows what they are doing and thinking. But this is a logical development of aristocratic worldliness. Fashionable life, as Proust attests, does indeed take place before the unblinking eyes of 'le tout Paris'.

Category:

Comedy

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• Wendy-Hiller
• Ann-Thornton
• Gary-Bond
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