★★★★★
Oscar Wilde’s final play, The Importance of Being Earnest, opened on 14 February 1895. That same night, the Marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, attempted to storm the theatre and hurl a bouquet of rotten vegetables at the stage. He was turned away. Within months, Wilde was arrested. Within years, he was dead, broken by poverty after two years of hard labour.
The Importance of Being Earnest has long been read as a razor-sharp satire of Victorian manners and the performance of propriety. Some scholars long suspected the name “Earnest” was also a wink: a coded celebration of queer love and the elaborate double lives it demanded.
Director Petra Kalive doesn’t suspect. She knows. And her production, presented by State Theatre Company South Australia, makes the subtext impossible to ignore, while losing nothing of the wit that made the play a classic.
The stage, designed by Kathryn Sproul, arrives like a dream. A towering teal-blue framework of arches and windowpanes stretches across the full width of the Dunstan Playhouse. Twisted branches threaded with pale pink blossoms snake overhead, evoking a glasshouse or winter garden; formal enough for Wilde’s aristocrats, playful enough to expose the absurdity beneath them.
A swing hangs in the country scenes, where the palette shifts to yellow walls and pink blossoms. A checkerboard floor curves past cream lounges, polished tables and cascading florals. Under warm light, the whole stage glows like a romantic illustration pulled from the pages of a book.
The costumes, also by Sproul, lean joyously into caricature. Algernon Moncrieff blazes in a vivid orange and gold velvet suit, orange sneakers on their feet. Ideal footwear, it turns out, for all the sneaking they do.
Lady Bracknell towers in voluminous green, gold and cream stripes beneath a dramatic white ruff. She is a grandmother, headmistress and hanging judge rolled into one formidable silhouette.
Jack Worthing wears cool, pale-striped tailoring: respectable, restrained, the look of a man trying very hard to keep control of a world that will not cooperate.
Gwendolen Fairfax sails in blues with exaggerated romantic sleeves. Black Converse peek beneath their skirt. Cecily Cardew bursts in all pink gingham and blooming pantaloons, freer and more mischievous than anyone else on stage.
Every character except Lady Bracknell is played by an actor whose identity does not align with their character’s. This is no stunt. It is the point. When the bodies who have historically been the punchline become the authors of the joke, something shifts.
Suddenly, the play’s central questions, about who gets to be who, and who is permitted to be seen, gain a charge the Victorian drawing room was designed to muffle.
Glenda Linscott’s Lady Bracknell patrols imperiously, leaning on her walking stick, her pronouncements delivered in ascending pitches of incredulity. She is the guardian of a moral order she did not invent and cannot explain.
She is hilarious. Terrifying. She is, unmistakably, the personification of every social structure that has ever demanded a person be someone they are not. Her green and gold colour scheme could be the representation of an “Australian values” citizenship test.
Connor Pullinger’s Gwendolen looks like a young Eddie Izzard at the height of their powers. They revel in drama. The earring removal alone is a fully committed theatrical event.
Teddy Dunn’s Jack goes on the evening’s biggest journey. He enters as the sensible straight man and is steadily, gleefully dragged up to the farcical pitch of everyone around him. The scene where Jack and Algernon tear into muffins and tea cake with the intensity of a territorial dispute is the comedic peak of the night.
The stars, though, are Anna Lindner and Pia Gillings. Lindner plays Algernon as pure rubber-limbed chaos. She bounds into scenes like Seinfeld’s Kramer, forever mid-lunge, forever stretching into some new configuration of enthusiasm.
Gillings, in pink curls and gingham as Cecily, reveals her romantic imagination in sparring sessions with Gwendolen that escalate with joyous precision. Gillings has the kind of presence that fills a cinema screen; she was in the Australian horror smash Talk to Me, and here she fills the Dunstan just as completely.
Much of the cast is more familiar to viewers of the big and small screen, which is fitting, as the three-act work is condensed into a one-act, movie-length performance, tied together by Carla Lippis. She is the production’s secret weapon and its moral centre.
Lippis plays Merriman and Lane: the servants. Between acts, she steps to the front in a Nick Cave pinstripe, signature bob and red lipstick immaculate, and performs original songs she co-composed with Geoffrey Crowther. “Everything’s dandy when daddy’s cheque book is handy,” she sings. And: the importance of being earnest when nobody knows what lies below the surface.
The songs bookend each act. They do not interrupt Wilde’s text. They deepen it. In fact, as Lane and Merriman, Lippis is dour, contained, and downtrodden by class into subservience and the hiding of her true self. The contrast between servant and singer is the whole production’s argument, distilled.
Kalive’s Director’s Note frames it plainly: Lane is the only character living honestly, and Lane’s constraint is economic, not moral. The music makes that visible. While the aristocrats play at being someone else, the working class is forced to remain someone they are not.
By condensing the play’s three acts into a single act, the legs and shoulders of audience members may begin complaining, even in the comfy new Festival Centre seats, especially in the middle sections involving the Miss Prism (Nathan O’Keefe) and Cannon Chasable (Caroline Mignone) subplot.
Crowther’s score and Andrew Howard’s sound design hold the evening together with precision, warmth and the occasional jolt of something rawer than Wilde’s cucumber sandwiches might suggest.
In the rehearsal room, Kalive has clearly given each performer the freedom to find and commit to their full sense of play. The result is one of those productions where you sense an entire company has been truly seen. They are not performing diversity. They are demonstrating what a diverse collective can deliver when given the room to show up whole.
Which brings us to the play’s last and most alive question. How does a group of eccentric individuals form a cohesive society? Wilde didn’t solve it. We haven’t either. But he understood, as this production understands, that any moral code worth having must include a commitment to tolerance, a celebration of difference and the radical flexibility to let people be who they actually are.
Even if that means pretending to be someone else.
The Importance of Being Earnest is presented by State Theatre Company South Australia and runs to 30 May at the Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Theatre.
Tickets: https://my.statetheatrecompany.com.au/overview/the-importance-of-being-earnest
Website: https://statetheatrecompany.com.au/shows/the-importance-of-being-earnest/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/statetheatresa/
Photo credits: Matt Byrne
