The Importance Of Being Earnest may have been written over a century ago but the platform festival managed to inject a fresh and lively approach.
The cast was a mixture of experienced MA theatre students to people who had never acted before in their life.
Every person managed to dive into character and immersed themselves in roles that showed off genuine talent. The set was very minimal but this allowed the acting and brilliant script to shine through.
The basic synopsis of the plot is that characters adopt a fictional identity so that they can escape from social obligations, while at the same time playing on the pun of the name Earnest.
The Platform version follows the same plot and chooses the best of Oscar Wilde’s witticisms that caused the crowd to burst into laughter.
Angernon and Jack are best friends who soon find out that each of them make up the names Bunbury and Earnest, respectively, when they fancy a little break.
Two women, Cecily and Gwendolen, fall in love with the men believing that they both have the most desirable name of Earnest. Cecily is most impressed by Angernon while Gwendolen falls for Jack. But when the two women meet each other and both speak of marrying somebody called Earnest, a storm soon erupts when they initially think it is the same man.
The two girls who played these parts portrayed this friction very comically. Cecilly asks Gwendolen if she would like some tea and when her reply is “sugar is no longer fashionable” Cecilly proceeds to put as much in the tea as she possibly can.
She also throws a piece of cake at Gwendolen when she snubs her offer.
Lady Braknell, the controlling upper class mother of Gwendolen who enjoys a sip from her hip flask, was played brilliantly with apt and believable face expressions in all the right places.
The girl who played Cecilly quickly adopted the role of a pretty and desirable young woman, while the two lead men had a chemistry that evoked everything well-off bachelors should.
The play soon has its twists and turns when it emerges that Miss Prism, the governess of Cecily, is Jack’s mother who accidentally left him as a baby on a train platform.
Due to his adoption it soon becomes clear that Jack is not his real name and it turns out that his birth name was actually Earnest the whole time. The play ends with the line "I've now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest."
It certainly doesn’t sound like the easiest story to follow but the actors pulled it off so well that it quickly became an amusing and talented piece of theatre.
Some of my favourite quotes of the play...
"Literary criticism is not your forte. Leave that to people who didn’t go to university."
"The amount of people in London who flirt with their own husbands is scandalous."
"Hestitation of any kind if a sign of mental decay in the young."
"Never speak disrespectfully of society. Its only those who cant get in it who do that."
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