Smock Alley presents Oscar Wilde's 'trivial comedy for
serious people': The Importance of
Being Earnest. Directed by Kate Canning, this production takes Earnest from the
lavish period sets viewers of The Gate's productions of Wilde's works would
associate with his works, and places it in an expressionistic garden; other
than that, everything is as expected. Period dress, Wilde's paradoxes and
epigrams, cucumber sandwiches etc. If you have seen a production of Earnest
before you will not have many surprises here. That being said, the plays
(mostly young) cast deal competently with the material with a good sense of
timing and emoting which is benefited by the intimacy of Smock Alley's main
stage. Aislinn O' Byrne brings the most notable performance here with her
squeaky Cecily, who, at times, appears on the verge of bursting into a
psychotic rage.
I was partly disappointed by such a straight-forward
adaptation, taking the set prior to the actors arrival as something of a
promise for the unexpected, but really, this is more of an issue with the
source material rather than anything else. Oscar Wilde's showcases of
shallowness aren't especially flexible. They don't say much more than 'these
are very very shallow people' thus they don't really provide much opportunity
to experiment; they're shallow and
deeply rooted in the time in which they were written. The quality of Wilde's plays that maintains its popularity, and is
maintained here, is the humour. The quickness of the wit. It may not matter
from which mouth the epigrams come from because, simply, they're very funny.
Wilde's charm simply oozes through The Importance of Being Earnest, to the
point that it negates reinterpretation or revaluation. Being able to witness
that witty shadow of Wilde that looms over performances of his plays become the
reason to see them, rather than to see if anything new will be brought to the
table.
That being said, this is a perfectly competent performance;
despite that irrepressible shadow of Wilde.
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