Program Notes

The Importance of Being Earnest is a classical piece by Oscar Wilde. The first production was at the St. James Theater in London in 1895. The Importance of Being Earnest does not openly suggest any controversial issues and is a great source of comedy for any age group. Although the script doesn’t have much room for directorial interpretation, it has been constantly produced throughout the years and has taken upon many different design concepts within the productions. The comedic timing in the script and the constant puns is what attracts the audience to show time after time.

This play shows the hypocrisy and the extravagant behavior of the upper class society in London during the late Victorian era. In a world where the majority of people lived in slum like areas and made their living wages by working long hours in harsh conditions, the characters in The Importance of Being Earnest have no sense of this. Lady Bracknell’s Ideas of what is fashionable is unreachable for the majority of the classes living in London at the time. Her unrealistic expectations of fashionable living is something that many people are still unable to achieve in today’s society.

A major element within this play is the idea of living a double life. The excitement of the London night life was often a great escape to for many of London’s aristocrats. In the Importance of being Earnest, Algernon uses an imaginary character with persisting bad health to escape from his family to go out to the clubs, restaurants and to the country. Both Jack and Algernon have created these types characters in which they use to escape from their normal lives. They run into trouble when both the women they want to marry believe that they are both names Ernest and would not marry someone without that name. They try to hide their real names from their fiancées by requesting to be christened. Oscar Wilde lived his own double life since he was secretly a homosexual. Homosexuality was considered to be illegal during the late Victorian era and Oscar Wilde was imprisoned in 1895. By writing The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde made light of living a secret double life, although his caused him far more damage than the happy ending of the characters from this play. The double lives of the characters in The Importance of Being Earnest also poses a problem for Lady Bracknell, who constantly describes the inconvenience of Algernon’s “friend” Bunbury, even in the event of his “death.”

Marriage is something that the women in the play seem to have unrealistic fantasies and expectations about. From Lady Bracknell only wanting the most prestige of men marrying her daughter, Gwendolen only seeing herself marrying a man named Ernest, and Cecily imagining she is engaged before she has even met her fiancée. The idea that the women only plan on marrying the perfect man is a girly fantasy that the women are constantly chasing and are even willing to fabricate in their own minds. Lady Bracknell only wants her daughter to marry the best, which of course is every mothers inner fantasy but in the case of her daughter, a position in society is a must. This concept is something that only a few have the opportunity of achieving and is not necessarily the ingredient to a happy marriage. Even though Gwendolen seems to have her values in a husband misconstrued, having her mother disapprove of Jack and her chasing after him seems to be a form of rebellion against her mother and fulfilling a temptation that she would have not have fulfilled with a man her mother approved of. During the late nineteenth century, women were not able to divorce their husbands. Having this thought in the back of their heads may have been the reason the women were constantly chasing the perfect ideal man.

During the time of The Importance of Being Earnest, Keeping a high sense of etiquette and view of moral character was extremely important for the elite. Any minor difference in character was open for criticism. The upper class in London at this time was highly focused on what was fashionable in means of behavior, clothing, wealth, and marriage. This is all shown within The Importance of Being Earnest.