A Serious Play

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 893, 14 September 1956, Page 25

A Serious Play

SCAR WILDE describes The Importance of Being Earnest as a trivial comedy for serious people. The announcer who introduced the John Gielgud production in ZB Sunday Showcase last week, evidently accepted this sly sub-title at its face value. "This is a piece of the gayest nonsense," he

said in effect, "Turn your mind off: enjoy it." Simple man! Or rather, simple scriptwriter! Far from being trivial, The Importance merely wears a trivial mask. For what makes this comedy supreme masterpiece in English literature is precisely that it is not trivial at all, but deadly serious. In a few lines, Wilde can lay bare issues which took Shaw whole plays to adumbrate; marriage, high society, the class struggle; it is all there, delicate and deadly. How better could

Wilde have told us that romantic love exists only on paper, than by the scene where Cecily shows Algernon her -diary? It took Shaw all of Arms and the Man, Candida, and much of Man and Superman to deal with it. The Importance is Wilde’s undoubted masterpiece, and still a glory of the theatre. I never tire of it. What I am beginning to tire of, though, is the stranglehold placed on it these twenty years by the Gielgud-Evans combine, Their version lacks pace, and is at once over-stylised and over ordinary. Edith Evans’s frosty, rumbling grotesque, once hilarious, no longer delights me; Roland Culver’s Algernon was tog: fieavy. ahd: arsesia: and: Bhewmaia

Brown’s Gwendolen was incipient Evans, with rumbles afar off. I missed the rotund clericalism of this Dr, Chasuble, and Miss Prism went for a Burton in the hands of Jean Cadell. There remains Sir John Gielgud’s Ernest, still triumphant, and surprisingly, Celia Johnson’s Cecily, which was arch, clear, acid and crystalline, Decidedly, we need a new Importance. This one is

dated.

B.E.G.

M.