The Wilde view: comedy or satire

As the accompanying photo shows, I have just had the pleasure of watching a production of The Importance of Being Earnest, filmed at the Vaudeville Theatre in London, and shown on the screen at the Palace Theatre. These screenings of London productions to those of us out in the sticks, lacking the time and/or the money to catch all the many performances London has to offer, are very welcome: three more Wilde plays are promised for 2019: what a treat - we have already had the benefit of seeing the Marriage of Figaro from Covent Garden and the Threepenny Opera from the National Theatre. You lose something of the atmosphere, of course, and the ability to choose what you watch on the stage, as the camera tends to linger on the leading actors, but you are watching the play in an audience so there is a sense of being there as it happened and there is genuine audience reaction.

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde is a brilliant but tragic figure. In this age of LGBT liberation, he ought to be a hero, but there is a sense he doesn't quite fit in the pantheons where he might be celebrated. He was Irish, but doesn't seem to be accepted as part of the flowering of Irish writing; he was a hugely successful playwright, especially on the London stage, but never part of the society he entertained. He was a satirist, wickedly portraying the hypocrisy of the English establishment and yet his plays are often performed as English drawing room comedies. The fact that he was bisexual and fell in love with a young boy aristocrat now seems to define him and those who laud him. But reading Wilde's plays, and I have the Penguin Classic edition at home, these seems like genuine satires that could be seen as forerunners of many of the TV series and plays that blossomed from the 1960s onwards; in other words, they are very funny but also have a serious point.

The Importance of Being Earnest is Wilde's most famous play, so how did this performance rate? Well, Stage described it as "a clunker", "with all the subtlety of a meat tenderiser", and the Guardian as "inexpressibly coarse and vulgar". Maybe it is because we are in the age of LGBT liberation, that the production highlights homosexuality, with a picture of writhing naked men on the wall as the first sight on the curtain rising, and a curious propensity for male characters to kiss each other, notably Algernon Moncrieff and his butler. These flourishes are not part of Wilde's creation and seem to distract from it's main purpose, so two stars seems about right!