On Tuesday night I watched the DVD of the recent movie adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest. I enjoyed it very much, and I feel I now understand this play far better.
Until now, most of the productions I've seen of this old warhorse have played it in comic irony overdrive, with every line spoken with exaggerated knowingness by an actor who reeks of actoring, with the audience laughing along partly because it is indeed quite witty, but also out of a sense of patriotic duty. So full of quotations dear.
Well, these people played it in dead earnest.
At the end of Earnest there is what passes for a happy ending. In many productions, you think: what idiots, being taken in by this piece of ridiculous theatrical engineering. Are we now expected to clap these idiots? No way are these absurdly stupid and frivolous people, any one of whom would sacrifice a finger for a laugh, all going to stay married. So it's a good thing it's only the Windsor Rep, or maybe a posh film with that maniacal actress woman doing Lady B, and it's only a stupid play and it doesn't matter.
But the characters in this movie were very different. They were their own engineers. They knew that their "society" was an elaborate social construct that required from them their unrelenting willingness to accept the unacceptable and to believe the unbelievable.
The steely determination of Judy Dench's Lady Bracknell suddenly made sense. This is a woman who would no more tolerate an unsatisfactory marriage than a structural engineer would tolerate an unsatisfactory bridge design. She does not indulge her feelings ("a ha-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ndbag!?!?!?!?!"), she keeps them under iron control. A handbag. Hm. Instead of throwing a tantrum, she seeks clarification. And when it comes, but is unsatisfactory, she doesn't burn any bridges or indulge in any theatrically exaggerated fits. She simply declares the marriage off. But, she does it with the emotional self-control of the top diplomat that she is, a diplomat who knows that even the most final cuttings off of relations can be subject to revision at a later time, as of course later happens.
Her change of what for a want of a better word I'll call "heart" at the end, when those £130,000 in The Funds work their magic on her and make her appreciate what a very suitable wife Cicely Cardew will be for her Algy, and thus that Jack Worthing, who can refuse to allow Cicely to marry until she is thirty five and who uses that as a bargaining counter, is after all an acceptable spouse for her daughter, comes across not as shallow money grubbing, but as the judicious revision of policy in the light of new evidence of the sort which, I don't know, might have prevented World War I. She knows that Algy is a worthless fraud, and that without money to paper over the cracks of his character any marriage he is entangled in is doomed. She also knows that any friend (and in the end brother) of Algy's is probably an enemy of her daughter, but she silently redoes the sums and for Algy's and her family's sake, she accepts Jack marrying her daughter Gwendolen.
She even tolerates Jack pretending at the end that his real name is Earnest. I don't remember this being a lie in the original, but maybe I just wasn't paying attention in any of the previous productions I've seen, on account of them being so stupid.
This production uses the magic of the cinema to spell out the seething cauldron of fallen manhood and the absurd sentimentalities of romantically deluded womanhood that "society" is there to concrete over, something which all those earlier productions skated over, usually by having such unconvincing men in the lead roles. Algy and Jack are shown in their London haunts at the beginning, and there are lots of parts for aspiring actresses, if you get my drift. The pre-Raphaelite reveries of Cicely are shown with fantastic imaginary changes of costume, with Cicely as the Lady of Shallot and Algy as, literally, a knight in shining armour. Lady Bracknell herself is shown in her pre-society days dancing on the London stage, waving her bosoms and being for real one of the people she will later guard her children against. These are conflicting agendas that society must hold in balance, and which the ending of the drama must bolt together. Does this movie, I wonder, signify a dawning respect for Victorian values, and a belated appreciation by the movie-making classes that hypocrisy, aside from being a vice, also has its virtues?
The black joke of an ending where all present agree to tie up the loose ends into one great public lie is not a new device, of course. I once upon a time acted in a university production of John Webster's The Country Wife, a restoration comedy in which an hour and a half of mayhem and debauchery ends the same way. And think of the final scene of Beverley Hills Cop, in which the final shoot-out with the bad guys is solemnly re-scripted into an acceptable scenario for the benefit of the supreme police boss, when he finally arrives, all the dust having settled. "Is that true?" asks the supreme police boss when the lie is presented to him and he t once recognises it for the lie that it is. "It's what will be in my report," says his hitherto immaculately by-the-book underling. Earlier in Beverley Hills Cop, the Eddie Murphy character sets this final scene up by talking about an earlier lie of his which his pals didn't stick with. Remember that bit? "I just want to say that this lie was working. It was a good lie. It would have worked."
I thought this Earnest to be well cast throughout. Dench, as I say, is Dench, a huge force no matter how softly she speaks. Colin Firth and Rupert Everett as Jack and Algy are well contrasted, which you don't always see, Jack being suitably earnest and Algy being Algy. Frances O'Connor and Reese Witherspoon are also a good pair. Witherspoon's English accent is not wholly un-American, but I didn't find myself minding that much. Perhaps Cicely was originally an American herself. I seem to recall other reviews talking of some of this cast being "out of their depth", but I thought it all went swimmingly. My only quibble: I thought Miss Prism looked a bit too old. Her romance with Tom Wilkinson's Chasuble, who, opposite a younger Prism, would have been very convincing, appeared ridiculous and stagey and was accordingly, I felt, the one wrong note. Otherwise, recommended.
