Director’s Note: The Importance of Being Earnest opened in February of 1895 at the Saint James theatre in London. It was the height of Oscar Wilde’s dramatic career, and remains his most beloved and produced play. Unfortunately, it was also his last. A quarrel on opening night with the Marquees Queensbury over Wilde’s relationship with Queensbury’s son Lord Alfred Douglass resulted in three trials, ending with Wilde’s imprisonment for two years of hard labor for “homosexual acts.” After he was released, Wilde spent his remaining years in self-imposed exile in France, where his health deteriorated. Wilde claimed to have lost the joy of writing, but his wit remained sharp. Shortly before his death he is quoted as saying: "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go"
The process of rehearsing this play has led me to think, not just of the manners of the upper classes that Wilde so delightfully skewers with his comedy, but the iconoclastic women who inhabit the play. Gwendolyn, Cecily, Miss Prism, and Lady Bracknell are among the most delightful comic characters that any actor could have the opportunity to play. What makes them so appealing is the ways they deal with Victorian values, which were especially oppressive for women. While Jack and Algernon can just pretend to be someone else to avoid the responsibilities they find onerous, the women of this world have no escape from the perpetual pressure to conform to what is “respectable”.
Miss Prism and Lady Bracknell react to this pressure by embracing it with zealousness. Lady Bracknell is such a powerful matriarch that the only image we have of the unseen Lord Bracknell is a man confined to his room by her when guests arrive. Miss Prism is, perhaps, the biggest believer in the duties and responsibilities of a woman, but her suppressed artistic and romantic nature cannot help but burst forth from cracks in her rigid beliefs. Gwendolyn and Cecily may be our ingenues, but they are also fantasists and master-minds. They have their own ideals and desires, and they simply refuse to surrender them to tradition, circumstances, or even the wills men they love. I believe that Oscar Wilde, who himself fought to carve a place for himself in a repressive society that would eventually reject him, wrote these rebels as the true heroes of this play.