Earnest Productions

Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith 1930

• The emphasis on surface appearance which Wilde satirises in ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ is strongly reflected in the design and production values of early 20th-century revivals of the play.

• The sets and costume were highly stylised

• actors employed a similarly heightened artificial style of speaking and moving.

• Images from the Lyric Hammersmith production of 1930, directed by Nigel Playfair, show this very clearly.

• The actors are all carefully placed and appear stiff and unnatural, conveying the restrictions of dress and manner dictated by Victorian society.

Talawa Theatre Company at the Bloomsbury Theatre, London, 1989

• Talawa’s was the first all-black production in London. Rather than altering the script to accommodate ‘blackness’ or trying to subvert the play’s values, Brewster reasoned that the theme of identity and trying to work out one’s origins made it relevant to all sectors of society in Britain, black Britons in particular.

• Every reviewer noted that the play was entirely faithful to the original in everything but the colour of the actors

• '[Yvonne Brewster] has not transposed the play to black territory, with different, if analogous manners and conventions. She has not turned it upside down with black masters and white servants. The revelation of this production is that the sight of black actors inhabiting the skins and minds of upper class white Victorians does not seem strange or perverse'.
  The Guardian, 18 May 1989.

The Aldwych Theatre, 1993

Another all-star, period dress, version of the play

• Maggie Smith made her first stage appearance in London for five years as Lady Bracknell and critics were divided over her new interpretation of the role. For some, she exaggerated the comic elements of her character too much, but for others, her performance was a breath of fresh air:

• ‘The role of Lady Bracknell has always been haunted by the formidable ghost of Edith Evans, but at last another theatrical Dame has stolen the coveted crown and placed it firmly on her own head. Maggie Smith, with her handspan waist and sucked-lemon lips, is totally commanding.'

• Designer Bob Crowley gave the set an exaggerated sense of perspective which foregrounded the constant distortions of the truth throughout the play and reinforced the idea that nothing is quite as it seems.
  

The National Theatre (2025)

• luscious period dress production fuels this story of Algernon (Ncuti Gatwa, flamboyance personified), Jack (Hugh Skinner, comically vulnerable) and their secret identities with queer doubleness. Algernon is a cross-dresser. Jack might swing both ways. Both show up conventional masculinity to be nothing more than a performance. Algernon’s guiding principle of “Bunburyism” (a sensible alter ego who offsets his amoral hedonism), has never sounded more like a sexual double entendre.

• It borrows its look from Bridgerton’s playbook and there are passing pop references (from musical strains of Snoop Dogg to a mention of the queer London club, Dalston Superstore) but despite its knowingness, there is a delicately judged balance between fidelity to Wilde’s text and 21st-century playfulness.

• The same-sex gropes and innuendoes don’t seem to belong to the characters but are simply there, frothily transgressive (violation of social conventions) rather than sharply satirical.