Wilde Off the Mark

...for Miss Prism, Margaret Rutherford, whom I unfortunately saw as Lady Bracknell, for which she lacked sufficient aristocratic hauteur...

...In Shaw's largely carping review of the original production, his prime objection is that the play merely amused without touching him ("I go to the theater to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it . . ."), and his operative comparison is to W. S. Gilbert...

...Algernon: No: the appointment is in London...

...With a remarkable obtuseness for the shrewd critic he was, he considered it an early work of Wilde's refurbished in his later manner...

...Sincerity is, of course, the last thing you can afford in a typical Wildean role...

...for Lady Bracknell, Edith Evans, whom I have only heard on a recording of Gielgud's London production...

...Chasuble as "Chazhuble," and machinations as "mashinations...

...No other play I know of in the English language?or any other—comes so close to producing nonstop laughter in an audience when well performed...

...the inelegant performances are surely, in part at least, Porter's doing...

...To play Algy as a dullard is a first (and one hopes a last), for which the director too must take his lumps...

...Wit of so rarefied a nature requires commensurate acting and direction...

...for Cecily and Gwendolyn, I would choose Dorothy Tutin and Joan Greenwood from Anthony Asquith's movie version...

...In the present instance, though, Mann has done at least one thing right: He has refrained from directing the play himself...

...Take the bit in the country, where Algernon, impersonating the imaginary reprobate Ernest, with whom Cecily has fallen in love sight unseen, has to make up an excuse for not awaiting the return of his friend Jack, who wanted to thwart any meeting between his innocent ward and the rakish Algy...

...Alas, with the maniacal emphasis on naturalism in American acting, all flexibility of style remains totally undeveloped...

...But Miss Conolly is rather too drab-looking for the part, and, furthermore, having frequently understudied or acted with Rosemary Harris, tends (unconsciously, no doubt) to give us a Harris impersonation of disturbing imitativeness...

...It may be, for example, that the single wittiest piece of English dramatic criticism stems from Gilbert, who declared Beer-bohm-Tree's Hamlet "funny without being vulgar...

...The cleverness of Coward is that of a charming drawing-room conversationalist with an uncanny sense of theater...

...The dialogue is written for the rhythms, cadences and inflections of high Oxonian English, and can be no more translated out of it than a Debussy song or Bellini opera can work in translation...

...As the sweet, technically innocent yet saucy and not quite guileless Cecily, Kathleen Widdoes manages to look surprisingly youthful, and is occasionally able to sound remotely British...

...One must admit, too, that the commissioning of Stephen Porter as director seems superficially correct...

...Miss Widdoes is the kind of actress who conveys nothing quite so saliently as intense delight with herself in everything she does, but is unfortunately always cast in roles where the other characters and the audience are meant to love her...

...Now, Gilbert, whatever else we may think of him, was a very potent wit too, which might have registered more compellingly without the musical edulcorations of Sir Arthur Sullivan...

...as for Algernon, the best I have seen thus far was Robert Flemyng, but he, like some other actors, was not technically ready for the part until he was too old to play it...

...A good but very limited actress, Miss Wilson plays what she knows best: a foolish American spinster, gawky, preposterous and sincere...

...Even so, it is shocking to hear Miss Wilson (a most unformidable Lady Bracknell) read "On this point, as indeed on all points" with the accent on points, not on all...

...It is for this very reason that George Bernard Shaw—who along with William Congreve is the only serious challenger of Wilde's drawing-room comedy laurels—was unimpressed by The Importance...

...Cecily: Couldn't you miss it anywhere but in London...

...Stephen Porter's direction is generally uncluttered, but also unre-sourceful...

...Stiff and ponderous, he is cursed also with poor timing and misplaced emphases...

...I have a business appointment that I am anxious . . . to miss...

...Yet whenever we try to approach her with our affection, she has already glaringly beaten us to it, leaving us roughly in the situation of the unhappy Captain Scott arriving at the South Pole after terrifying hardships, only to find Amundsen's Norwegian flag already planted there...

...stylization is everything...

...Porter has proved himself, with the Phoenix Repertory and elsewhere, an often agreeable director of Noel Coward's light comedies and Georges Feydeau's farces...

...Mayhem has been committed, but at least we can't say, "The butler did it...

...In the hands—or, more particularly, mouths—of expert players, then, The Importance emerges as an archetype of wit of every kind, so perfect as to be, if not exactly inhuman, in some senses antihuman...

...The gray eminence of the outfit remains its cofounder and artistic director, Theodore Mann...

...Given also Zack Brown's and Ann Roth's uninspired scenery and costumes, only two things survive as wholly satisfactory: Munson Hicks' Manservant, and Thomas Ruisinger's Butler?wearily genteel and clandestinely astute...

...But between Coward, for all that I heartily enjoy him, and Wilde there is, ultimately, a considerable gap...

...The other principals, however, do not satisfy, despite Mary Louise Wilson having some moments as Miss Prism, and Patricia Conolly a few as Gwendolyn...

...for the Reverend Chasuble, I would prefer someone who does not look so grotesque as to make the satire on the church too obvious and ineffectual (hence not, as usual, Miles Malleson, but perhaps someone like Donald Sin-den, if he would rest content with a mere supporting role...

...As I review in my mind past productions of the work, I would pick for Jack, John Gielgud, whom I caught doing the part superlatively with the Old Vic on a New York visit...

...On the other hand, it is she who mispronounces most glaringly the name of Dr...

...As Algernon, John Glover manages to be completely graceless and witless, throwing away brilliant comic lines in the most heartbreaking fashion...

...The result is a paradoxical but not unappealing—indeed insidiously persuasive—plea for irresponsibility carried to the point of perversity: An appointment must be missed in the locale in which it was made...

...On Stage WILDE OFF THE MARK BY JOHN SIMON The Circle in the Square has produced Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest in a way that rates their organization a name change to the Square in the Square...

...That Wilde first fully succeeded in this, his last play, makes Queens-berry and his England, the destroyers of Wilde, emerge even more criminal: for stopping not only the greatest English comic playwright, but also one who had just come into his own and might have gone on to God knows what further glories...

...Still more disturbing, because she is in a more important role, is Elizabeth Wilson as Lady Bracknell...

...Nothing to sneeze at, surely, yet The Importance is something to make us gape with admiration...

...Cecily: Well, I know how important it is not to keep a business engagement, if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life . . . You will note how the humor begins as Algernon, in order to maintain his wicked fascination for Cecily, must change from his initial intention of saying "a business appointment I am anxious to keep" to a less utilitarian, more amoral "to miss," and how the comedy develops from this emendation...

...Algernon...

...This is the sort of thing Shaw considered "inhuman," an epithet he invoked in connection with both Gilbert and certain aspects of Wilde...

...As Chasuble, G. Wood gives a performance so truly horrendous as to be comparable only to other G. Wood performances: an oozing, unctuous, totally doltish way of talking and behaving that he bleats and clumps out changelessly for any part he plays...

...The trouble goes deeper than that, though...

...or in a certain utilitarian approach to art in Shaw, always a moralist straining to educate, and thus more in favor of "constructive" humor than of "destructive" wit...

...The occasionally awkward clocking may be the fault of the impractical shape of the Circle's stage...

...of a writer fondly cognizant of human drollness and absurdity, and able to couch them in pleasing salon-theater forms...

...It can be explained, perhaps, in terms of Shaw's shockable puritanism, for wit in its ultimate manifestations is profoundly impudent...

...In the current production, only James Valentine (who, I believe, is Canadian, and definitely London-trained) as Jack, begins to have the right delivery, and though he is more than acceptable at first despite a stodgy physique, he does begin to pall well before the end for lack of variety...

...What Wilde did was to raise drawing-room comedy to an almost superhuman purity, a kind of algebra of wit, where irony, satire, paradox, anticlimax, and the surreal operate with, as it were, a scientific precision, seeming to leave nothing to chance and human imperfection...

...In any case, the play has to be acted by Britishers, or Americans who can sound truly English, if there are any such...

...In fact, I have the feeling that the only reason there are moments in The Importance when we do not laugh is that Wilde wisely understood the need to allow an audience time to catch its breath, as well as avoid cramps in various muscles...