The Importance of Being Earnest - A Trivial Comedy Performed by two Serious People

Synopsis

Seriously funny and deadly serious. Ridiculusmus are back with a new version of Wilde's classic high-society comedy. David Woods and Jon Haynes don't know exactly what the show will be. They have copies of the text (which, helpfully, Jon memorised at twelve years old); they know there will be no great dames of the British theatre, no plush velvet seats and proscenium arches. They have decided that they will play all the parts in the show themselves (although there have been arguments about who gets to say the immortal line 'a handbag?'). The rest will be coming together. Only one thing is guaranteed - you will never have seen an Importance like this before.

Latest User Review

81.134.1.240) - 14 June 2005:

Having seen the duo perform "Say Nothing" in Edinburgh in 2001 (one of the cleverest, funniest plays I have ever seen) I was really looking forward to seeing what they did with "Earnest". I was hugely disappointed. The show succeeds to ruin a truly great play (hundreds of missed opportunities to exploit the humour with which the play is filled); I spent the evening wondering why they had bothered, what was the point. Neither of the duo seemed particularly comfortable delivering the text (and the play is all about text), and I have to say the level of humour that they did manage to dredge from their performances was consistently peurile, well beneathy their own demonstarted abilities, as mentioned above. An intersting and brave experiment, and all power to them for stretching out, but not a path worth treading again....

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