The Importance of Being Earnest is a play so clever, so charming and so well and widely loved that it need hardly be seen at all. Such, at least, is the implicit opinion of Broadway: While Oscar Wilde's comedy of manners and manors remains a staple of American regional theatres and traditional Off Broadway troupes, it hasn't brightened the Great White Way since 1977. (The revival before that one was in 1947.)
Enter Brian Bedford's 2009 production - grandly gowned, and to proper applause - which comes to New York by way of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Smarting from a weak 2009-2010 season, the city's huge not-for-profit Roundabout Theatre Company has been swathed of late in the protective folds of Anglophilia. It has now invited Bedford to reprise (as director and leading lady) much of his Stratford production at the Roundabout's flagship Broadway house.
Not a marquee name per se, Bedford nonetheless belongs to the highest tier of classical actors. He won a Tony Award in 1971 for Molière's The School for Wives but has returned to Broadway just five times in the past 25 years: twice more in Molière plays, once in Shakespeare, once in a 19th-century farce and once as a 19th-century Shakespearean. (He earned Tony nominations each time.)
Restored to period finery as the dagger-witted, formidably snobbish Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, Bedford presides splendidly over Wilde's madcap world of true love, false IDs, cucumber snacks and romantic pickles. Accompanying him from Stratford are Desmond Heeley's sets and costumes, Berthold Carrière's music and a pair of actors: the piquant Sara Topham as Bracknell's daughter Gwendolen, and Bedford's long-time partner Tim MacDonald as a servant.
The rest of the cast is new, and largely commendable. Stage veterans Dana Ivey and Paxton Whitehead wither and dither with aplomb as Miss Prism and Reverend Chasuble, respectively. Santino Fontana capers adorably as Bracknell's nephew and Wilde's stand-in, the dandyish Algernon; Charlotte Parry, gently daffy, spars with him well as Cecily - the ward of his stuffy friend Jack (David Furr) and the object of his somewhat unlikely affections.
What Algernon and Cecily do have in common is Wilde's well-practised trick of negating conventional ideas into witticisms - a tune they also share, in a rather jauntier key, with Lady Bracknell. "A high moral tone is hardly conducive to either one's health or one's happiness," says Algernon. "I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much," observes Cecily. "I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance," declares Bracknell. "Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit, touch it and the bloom is gone."
Such carefully polished insouciance runs the risk of growing tedious - "I am sick to death of cleverness," as Algernon cleverly says - but Bedford's direction keeps self-consciousness in check. Fontana offsets the tightness of his epigrams with saucy grins and amusing moues, and Bedford dodges the pitfalls of archness throughout, even while upholstered in Heeley's resplendent, dragonish outfits. (Less felicitous, to my eye, is the painterly, purple-grey splotchiness of the emphatically theatrical sets.)
What is most remarkable about Bedford's performance, perhaps, is how seldom its high points rely on verbal dazzle. Without slighting Wilde's exquisite jokes - some of the finest ever written for the stage - he wrings equal mirth from a false smile, a genuine wince, or such seemingly artless verbiage as "Found!" or "I beg your pardon?" Brilliant though they be, the lines are sometimes immaterial.
The Importance of Being Earnest
- Written by Oscar Wilde
- Directed by Brian Bedford
- Starring Brian Bedford, Santino Fontana, David Furr
- At the American Airlines Theatre in New York City
The Importance of Being Earnest runs in New York City until Mar. 6.
Special to The Globe and Mail