This performance, to my taste, relies far too heavily on the fame of Wilde’s sexuality and veers too far from the play itself. The director said rather crudely, “Wilde would no doubt approve of the eye-candy.” The production made the play overtly gay and charged it with the political agenda of gay marriage.
The 1998 production sets the play in New York City’s gay populated Chelsea District and in the Tony Hamptons on Long Island. Both productions were critically acclaimed at the time however their reported pantomime-esque performances of Lady Bracknell are not really fitting with the real performative shift that happened in the move into the 21st century. Prior to 1998 there are a handful of notable productions which cast a man as Lady Bracknell, for example William Hutt in Canada in 1975 and Ellis Rabb in New York in 1983. In fact theatrical cross-dressing in Oscar Wilde is a very particular and effective mode of unconvincing performance that offers a mirror unto ourselves and exposes being as playing a role. Identity in this play is utterly arbitrary thus to try and make comedy by performatively transgressing these identities is problematic.īut despite what many critics have argued, cross-dressing is not now, nor ever has been, just a ‘gay gimmick’. Instead the play tackles a far broader sense of immutable identities. In comparison to other works, such as Dorian Gray which quite explicitly displays same sex desire, it is quite difficult to extract what we might call a ‘gay subtext” from this play. This undeniably rather crude homage to the queer legacy of Oscar Wilde set a cross-dressing trend for the play, moving into the twenty-first century.įor all that we might want to project the politics of Wilde’s sexuality upon The Importance Of Being Earnest, in reality the connections between the play and subversive sexuality are quite tenuous. In 1998 an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ was performed in New York with a cast of all men. In reality however, cross-dressing in Oscar Wilde is not a new or radical phenomenon and, in this play in particular, it is a feature that is arguably quite appropriate. Earlier this year, Bruiser Theatre Company’s ‘all male’ Belfast production of the Importance Of Being Earnest sent waves of controversy through the theatre world, receiving criticisms and accusations of “entrenching homophobia and sexism” and “exacerbating the stereotype of gay men”.
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