Word: algernon
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OSCAR WILDE'S witty dialogue is the only saving grace in the Boston Shakespeare Company's production of The Importance of Being Earnest. From Algernon Moncrief's description of the practice of "bunburrying" in the first scene to his statement in the last that "style, not sincerity, is the vital thing," all entertainment value comes from Wilde himself and not from the actors' plastic performances...
...this farce that mocks the English aristocratic culture of the 1890's, the central character Algernon (James Finnegan) has invented a sick younger brother, Bunburry, as an alibi for his many trips to the country. His friend, John Worthing (Henry Woronicz) has a similar stratagem: he is Ernest in town and Jack in the country. The drama focuses on the confusion engendered by these men's double identities when they meet their lovers-to-be--who both insist that their husbands be named Ernest...
...male leads, the "fleshly poet" Bunthorne and the "idyllic poet" Grosvenor, who inherits the train of lovesick maidens from Bunthorne in the second act. (Audiences at the first performance of "Patience," exactly one hundred years ago today, recognized these two as thinly disguised versions of Oscar Wilde and Algernon Swinburne.) It is an accepted convention in American performances of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas for the singers to imitate a British accent. The convention is not a sacrosant one: as Broadway's current production of The Pirates of Penzance with Linda Ronstadt and a street gang of pirates testifies, the operettas...
...Algernon Charles Swinburne, an ardent masochist, rhymed about the pleasures of flagellation. Whippings and alcohol distorted his judgment (as E.E. Cummings put it, "Punished bottoms interrupt philosophy"), but Ober believes that the poet's problems began during the first moments of his life. He recalls Swinburne's own statement about having been born "all but dead," and diagnoses brain damage due to oxygen deprivation. Further circumstantial evidence of neuropathology included the poet's small body and outsized head, his tics and excessively nervous temperament. But his talent was not impaired. Neither was his critical acumen, at least...
...Consider some of the outlandish elements of the play: its baby found in a handbag, its imperious dowager, Lady Bracknell (Elizabeth Wilson), who is "a monster with out being a myth, its one young man, John Worthing (James Valentine), who invents a dissolute brother, and its other young man, Algernon Moncrieff (John Glover), who blithely proceeds to impersonate him. This is farce walking the tightrope of absurdity. But it is also farce at its most urbane - as insolently monocled in manner as it is killingly high-toned in language...