The importance of freeing Earnest – without bursting Oscar Wilde’s ‘delicate bubble of fancy’ | Michael Billington

The 1895 comedy has been staged with age-blind and all-male casts and even David Suchet as Lady Bracknell. Now reinvented again, at the National Theatre, the trick is to be seriously funny

I can’t think of many plays that have left such a strong footprint as The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde’s comedy has been parodied, pastiched and plundered by, among others, Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett and Joe Orton. It has been filmed several times, inspired musicals and an opera and is one of the most quoted plays in the language. Yet, as Max Webster’s new production is about to open at the National Theatre, it strikes me that Wilde’s work is still the subject of endless debate. What kind of play is it and how do we stage it today? These are the questions that still divide opinion.

People have been arguing about the true nature of the play ever since its premiere in 1895. Wilde himself described it as “a delicate bubble of fancy”, but added: “It has its philosophy.” At the time its philosophy was hard to discern. The critic William Archer spoke for many when he said the play was nothing “except a sort of rondo capriccioso, in which the artist’s fingers run with crisp irresponsibility up and down the keyboard of life”. Only after Wilde’s arrest did people begin to see that a play in which the two male leads invent fictive personae in order to escape domestic obligations was a metaphor for the author’s own double life.