Hurried, resounding strains of a Rachmaninoff prelude are abruptly cut short. Algernon Moncrieff leaps up from his piano and enters the gorgeous morning-room of his flat on Half Moon Street, Piccadilly. The date is 1912, and the decor is opulently oriental exactly befitting the fashion of the moment. "Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?" he casually demands of his manservant. "I didnt think it polite to listen, sir". "I'm sorry for that, for your sake" sighs Algernon, reclining himself on a chaise longue to the side of the stage. And then, musing over his exceptional and apparently wasted talents, "I dont play accurately - any one can play accurately - but I play with wonderful expression." (He seems to say this rather for his own benefit that for anyone elses.) So begins Wilde's impeccable comedy of manners. Blithe, shocking, and flawlessly observed. 
      High jinks are sparked when Algernon's friend Jack Worthing confides to him a peculiar secret: In order to maintain respectability at his country estate (where he has a young ward Cecily) without having to give up all the pleasures of a carefree existence, he (Jack) has invented a tearaway younger brother Earnest whose persona he adopts whenever he is in town. Hearing that beautiful Cecily longs to meet the disreputable brother, Algernon takes a trip to the country and announces himself to her as Earnest. She immediately falls in love with him, exclaiming that she has always wanted to marry a man called Earnest. Jack has meanwhile proposed to Gwendolen in town, also under the name of Earnest. She too ecstatically accepts, but again on the strange condition that this really is his name. When they all inadvertently assemble at the country Manor over the course of Act II, the scene is set for wild misunderstandings. 
      Collectively joyful with laughter from the start of the first act, the audience burst into applause when Wendy Craigs Lady Bracknell complained of her future son-in-law "To be born, or at any rate bred, in a handbag, seems to me a display of contempt for the ordinary decencies...", and "To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune... to lose both seems like carelessness". Andrew Havill's Mr. Worthing is appropriately dapper. Olivia Darnleys endearing Cecily Cardew, combining worldly common-sense with utter naivet, achieves a sense of being both protagonist and unfortunate victim of her subsequent marriage to Algernon. Strolling in the idyllic gardens of Mr. Worthings Manor House, Frank Middlemass bumbling Rev. Chasuble, and Josephine Tewsons ghastly coquettish old maid Miss Prism, are outstanding and improbable comic creations. 
      However, in light of the natural felicity of this entire set-up, it is a shame that many of the principal characters - particularly Algernon and Gwendolen - laboriously play up their roles with self-conscious pauses and glances to the audience after each line they speak. This lends an air of deliberate camp to a play that needs no such favours, and which would amuse with more subtlety in their absence. You might wonder, is this self-conscious showmanship really such a problem? After all, isnt The Importance of Being Earnest a play all about ostentation? But the shiny dialogue requires no overacting to make its point, and there is another theme that might otherwise have been brought out. 
      Somewhere between the sincere authenticity of the romantic, and the self-parody of camp, lies the exquisite irony of the dandy. More flippant than the one, and more nihilistic than the other, Wildes comedy might have been played so as to capture something of this elusive character (a character that fascinated him). Indeed, in his 1988 study, Peter Raby claims that "The difficulty of placing the dandy satisfactorily within the dramatic context remained Wildes most intractable aesthetic problem." Aesthetic and self-absorbed, irreverent and vain, the conceit is that the dandy is merely amusing himself while he plays at interacting with others. Despite his preoccupation with style, he doesnt ultimately care how he is perceived (except by himself). When it comes to it, ingeniously, he would rather reinterpret the whole world than answer to the judgement of society. Hence the aloof subversion of the dialogue. Occupying a notoriously unstable and ambiguous position, the dandys heaped up inconsistencies and demands for reinterpretations are precisely designed to ensure he is always one step ahead. So when he speaks, he emphatically does not wait for his audiences reaction. 
      Wilde said of The Importance of Being Earnest that "It was written by a butterfly for butterflies". While absolutely explicit in the dialogue, this is a dimension of the play that is not perfectly conveyed. Regardless, with such well-known and well-loved material - not to mention a familiar and adored cast - and showing at one of Londons loveliest theatres, this production never fails to delight.
Naomi Goulder