{"id":328,"date":"2011-10-25T14:46:13","date_gmt":"2011-10-25T12:46:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=328"},"modified":"2011-10-25T14:46:13","modified_gmt":"2011-10-25T12:46:13","slug":"returning-to-wilde-once-more-la-importancia-de-ser-frank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2011\/10\/25\/returning-to-wilde-once-more-la-importancia-de-ser-frank\/","title":{"rendered":"RETURNING TO WILDE ONCE MORE: LA IMPORT\u00c0NCIA DE SER FRANK<\/em> <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

We have included again Oscar Wilde\u2019s delicious comedy The Importance of Being Earnest<\/em> in our Victorian Literature syllabus and, luckily for our students, this has coincided with the successful production offered at Teatre Gaud\u00ed by the stage company Lazzigags Productions. Ivan Campillo, responsible for the new Catalan translation, is, besides, the director and also the mendacious John Worthing, who finds to his chagrin at the end of the play that he has been telling the truth all along.<\/p>\n

Surfing the net, I learn that Ricardo Baeza seems to be the Spanish translator who came up in 1919 with the sorry title La importancia de llamarse Ernesto<\/em>. Gosh. The Argentinean translator Agust\u00edn Rem\u00f3n went instead for the bland, unimaginative La importancia de ser hombre serio<\/em>. Later Spanish versions tried to play with the pun included in Wilde\u2019s title, and resulted in much better variations, such as Alfonso Reyes\u2019s La importancia de ser Severo<\/em>. This, however, has not caught on. As the Wikipedia author wisely notes, if in Catalan the usual title is La import\u00e0ncia de ser Frank<\/em>, since the Catalan adjective \u2018franc\u2019 means \u2018honest\u2019 as in English, one wonders why we don\u2019t have La importancia de ser Honesto<\/em> (which rhymes with Ernesto!) Or Perfecto<\/em>, which would have amused Wilde indeed.<\/p>\n

The gimmick of Campillo\u2019s production is having a male actor, Ferran Castells, play both Lady Bracknell and the butler Merriman. The students who have seen the play were quite mystified by this. It is not, however, something unheard of, much less unusual. A review of a recent Chicago production (2010) notes that \u201cLady Bracknell, that caustic queen<\/em> of Oscar Wilde’s comedies of obfuscation, tends to be played by men in drag. I doubt the doyenne would approve of this pervasive trend on Broadway and beyond \u2014not that anybody ever asked the old buzzard\u201d (my italics). Of course, Peter Pan used to be played by a young woman in drag, a habit inherited from old pantomime due to the titillation provided by the public display of female legs encased in tights. I am not sure, though, what kind of titillation is provided by a male-in-drag or drag queen Lady Bracknell. Is it because she\u2019s outspoken and authoritarian that she\u2019s thought to be masculine? Is it because she\u2019s seen as a \u2018queen\u2019 in the gay sense of the word? How trite \u2013I just can\u2019t see a Victorian man saying her lines at all; this seems to be a gross misreading (or miscasting). Whatever the case is, Edith Evans was so good in the 1952 film version that I\u2019ve managed to forget I\u2019ve actually seen Judy Dench play the role in the 2002 version with Colin Firth and Rupert Everett. Odd, very odd.<\/p>\n

I enjoyed Campillo\u2019s version, in the end, because it proves that the text still works as a comedy, more than one hundred years later and in a quite different context. Campillo\u2019s is quite a conventional production with an irregular tempo that should be faster yet I found it solid enough, particularly considering that, as for my students, for many members of the audience this is a first introduction to Wilde. I found the funniest moments still amusing even though I knew what was coming and that is high praise for the cast. We\u2019ll see how the musical version of Els crims de Lord Arthur Saville<\/em> works at TNC in a few months.<\/p>\n

At Teatre Gaud\u00ed, my hair stood on end when I heard John explain that his \u2018brother\u2019 Frank\/Ernest had died of a severe cold alone in Paris, for Oscar Wilde died there also alone (though of cerebral meningitis) in 1901 only six years after the play was first performed. Perhaps the bitter seeds of his disgrace were already there, in his protagonists\u2019 imperious need to lie and lead a double life. Sadly, very Victorian…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We have included again Oscar Wilde\u2019s delicious comedy The Importance of Being Earnest in our Victorian Literature syllabus and, luckily for our students, this has coincided with the successful production offered at Teatre Gaud\u00ed by the stage company Lazzigags Productions. Ivan Campillo, responsible for the new Catalan translation, is, besides, the director and also the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theatre","category-victorian-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}