The Mercury Theatre in Colchester has today announced that they will be reviving Oscar Wilde’s beloved comedy The Importance of Being Earnest from 1-16 March 2024. The Mercury Production, which will be directed by the Mercury’s Creative Director Ryan McBryde (They Don’t Pay? We Don’t Pay!, The Comedy of Errors), will give Wilde’s dazzling wit a stylish makeover and will open the theatre’s 2024 season.
Widely regarded as one of the greatest comedies ever written, The Importance of Being Earnest zings with contemporary relevance, subversively satirising the snobbery and hypocrisy of extreme wealth and excess.
McBryde said of today’s announcement, “We’re delighted to be launching our 2024 season with Wilde’s mirth inducing masterpiece. Though it is without doubt one of the funniest plays in the English language, Earnest often gets branded as a frivolous farce. But when you scratch away the surface the play is actually a scathing and subversive attack on the official order of English society, ridiculing our values and beliefs, demolishing the late nineteenth-century’s social and moral attitudes. Wilde’s skewering of class, marriage, hereditary privileges, education, religion, and gender identity is actually a scorching social satire, as relevant today as it was to our Victorian ancestors.”.
McBryde continued, “We’re working with designer Katie Lias to dispel the myth that Earnest is a fusty, dusty Victorian period piece. We’re envisaging our version of Earnest as a bright, colourful and vibrant English fantasia embracing a retro chic aesthetic.”
Further information on casting and creative team will be announced at a later date.
More information can be found at www.mercurytheatre.co.uk
