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by Oscar Wilde, directed by Brian Bedford

Stratford Festival, Avon Theatre, Stratford

June 2-October 30, 2009

"The Importance of Being Bracknell"

With Stratford’s eighth production of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”, Brian Bedford becomes the second male actor in Stratford history to take on the role of the formidable Lady Bracknell.  The first was the late William Hutt in Robin Phillips’ famous production of 1975, so popular it was later revived in 1976 and 1979.  Anyone old enough to have seen that production will know that Hutt’s performance puts Bedford’s completely in the shade.  Hutt really was the “gorgon” that Jack Worthing calls Lady Bracknell, while Bedford seems merely an eccentric old lady with a surprising soft streak in someone whom everyone supposedly fears.

As a director, however, Bedford crafts an “Earnest” just about a perfect as one could hope for.  His best stroke was in selecting the incomparable Desmond Heeley to design the show.  Thanks to Heeley, this “Earnest”, unlike any you may have seen before, is as visually magical as it is verbally clever.  Everyone knows that Wilde’s play has nothing to do with realism but is, from its symmetrical plot to its epigrammatic language, a delectable confection of artifice.  Heeley’s designs are the first I’ve ever seen to capture “Earnest”’s playfulness visually on stage.  All three sets look less like physical structures than shimmering, whimsical water-colours projected into three-dimensions.  All three are beautiful but the garden set for Act 2, with pastel flowers artfully entwined about an enormous lattice fence with a view of the manor house in the distance is simply breath-taking.  In costuming, too, Heeley pointedly contrasts the more sober garb of Jack with the showier wear of Algernon.  He picks up on the line that Gwendolen will one become like her mother, by giving her a hat that looks like it will eventually flower into the headpiece tottering atop Lady Bracknell.  Lady B.’s hat itself is a masterpiece in that it is so constructed that it seems through its wobbling to nod in agreement with everything the gorgon utters.

Bedford’s cast is nearly ideal.  Too often directors treat the two male and female pairs as if they were interchangeable.  Bedford plays up their differences.  Mike Shara’s Algernon is playful and flippant while Ben Carlson’s Jack is on the serious side and is usually the butt of Algernon’s jokes.  Sara Topham is an ideal Gwendolen, already concerned with propriety like her mother, but still with a sense of wit.  Andrea Runge shows Cecily as the fun-loving but unspoiled country lass, but she does fail to capture the full quirkiness of her abundant fantasy life in which she can write letters to herself from Jack and yet pretend they’re his.  Nevertheless, Bedford direction makes clear that it is destined that the two conformists belong together as do the two fantasists.

Sarah Dodd is the funniest Miss Prism I’ve ever seen and pretty much steals the show.  Unlike ever other actor in this role, Dodd gives us a Miss Prism whom we can really believe did write a three-volume novel in her younger days.  In fact, Dodd shows that Prism present strictness is a self-imposed not only to serve as a model for her charge but mainly to suppress the wildly romantic side of her own nature.  The rampant conflict between surface and emotion makes her every remark and gesture hilarious.  Stephen Ouimette shows a similar tension in his excellent Reverend Canon Chasuble.  Robert Persichini is very funny as Algernon’s dour butler Lane), while Tim MacDonald, too young to be the Cardews’ butler Merriman, misses many comic opportunities.    

While many Stratford regulars will think it is funny simply to see Brian Bedford in a dress, he misses many of the essentials of why a Bracknell in drag should be funny.  the late William Hutt had large features, especially his W.C Fields-like nose.  The humour there was not merely seeing him in drag but seeing what an hideously ugly woman he made.  That is not true of Bedford.  He has generally small facial features and actually makes a fairly good-looking elderly woman.  Everyone knows that Bedford brings the same bag of stage tricks to every role he plays.  One of these is his conspiratorial smile.  Any director other than Bedford would have insisted that he forgo this habit.  Lady Bracknell is a character who has no sense of humour and does not smile for any reason.  That is what makes her so formidable.  The first of the four or so times Bedford smiles as Bracknell he reveals a crack in Bracknell’s façade where there should be none.  We are not supposed to like her but fear her Gibraltar-like immovability.  Otherwise, the what little sense of danger in the plot is lessened since Bracknell is the primary blocking figure.

Despite all this, the current production is more than the sum of its parts and stands as the most successful production of this classic play in Ontario in since Robin Phillips’s Stratford production of the 1970s or Derek Goldby’s for CanStage in 1990.  The clarity of of Bedford’s direction, Heeley’s design and Dodd’s Prism alone make it one of this year’s must-see plays at Stratford.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Sara Topham, Ben Carlson, Brian Bedford and Sarah Dodd. ©David Hou.