It's hard to separate modern adaptations of Importance of Being Earnest from our modern understanding of ‘camp’.
Other words may come to mind as well: ‘biting’, ‘acerbic’, ‘iconic’, ‘vicious’ and so on. Oscar Wilde as a writer was never one who wanted to do the same thing forever; he was as hilarious as much as he was viciously critical of the world around him.
A new adaptation by Bloomshed has taken Wilde’s most famous play and lovingly torn it apart. Coming off their big success with Animal Farm last year, Bloomshed’s artistic director James Jackson tells me of the fervid creativity of the now two-time Green Room award-winning team.
The Importance of Being Earnest
- 1 – 11 August 2024
- Fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
- Tickets are $35 – $48
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“We are looking to explore issues that relate to us right now and relate to our reality. We take the very essence of a play and update for our modern context. In this one we definitely are producing it with the spirit of Oscar Wilde’s original text and turning it on its head for contemporary audiences. Most theatre-going people know the play pretty well–it is in the repertoire. So our approach is: “What can we do to really shake that up?”
Wilde’s text is a play about double lives, masks worn by the elite to hide their true selves. James and the Bloomshed team are not just updating the work, but pulling it apart, dissecting it, feasting and drinking the marrow of the play to reach its essential components.
“We have respect for the author and the work but we don’t necessarily take their advice. We really tried to activate the play, really strip it down to its essence.”
James says this is a style unique to Bloomsheds creative direction: “We have condensed it down to a very short duration—about an hour—and it is only a four-part play with multiple roles switching in and out.
“The whole show by the end of the 2nd act really collapses into a new kind of play which turns into a whole trial scene with Lady Bracknell, putting us (the actors) on trial for trying to adapt such a classic text. It is a response to the attitude in theatre of how people approach texts and classic texts.”
Bringing out the immensity of such a classic text is a difficult feat. James mentions that Wilde didn’t necessarily make it easy to adapt to the modern age: “Reading over the original work I realised just how good it was. When I read it I thought that every single line was a nugget of gold. It is loaded with witty retorts and hilarious explications on civil society. But what sings out to us is that we live in a very Instagram-informed reality and everyone in our society is layering masks on masks on masks.”
James describes Bloodshed’s creative process as an ‘egotistical scrub fest’ a phrase that belongs neatly to a nearly 10-year-long creative collaboration.
I asked him more about the idea of a trial and how that related to the real-life trial of Oscar Wilde: “In many ways, his audience became his jury and his critics became his jailers. A lot of our works tend to put the author directly on stage. We were putting the character of Earnest directly on stage as a kind of ghost—like a gothic horror comedy. He haunts the play and that ghost is Earnest but also Oscar Wilde. To really adapt this play you need to see Oscar, he needs to be a figure…we don’t feel that a play about masks and double lives should completely ignore its author and his own life.”
“Everything in this play is fuelled by desire, and the masks can barely contain the throbbing heartbeat of desire; The sexual relationship between Jack and Algernon, between Gwendolen and Cecily, the whole play ends up devolving into a candlewax orgy in Paris. That liberation of our sexual desires is subterranean and subcutaneous, inspiring us in our performances and everything we do.”
They hope to do exactly what Wilde did in 1894; making people see themselves in the play and laughing at the world and their place in it. With Wilde’s classic sense of irreverent dandyism, Bloomshed’s new ‘plush punk’ adaptation is still a typically Wildean adventure: “We always asked ‘What would Wilde do in this instance, what would he do in this era if he were alive today?’ And I think Wilde would absolutely love to see his text ripped to shreds in front of modern audiences in 2024. I think he would do it as well.”
The Importance of Being Earnest is playing at Fortyfivedownstairs between 1-11 August.
