The Theatre: Old Play in Manhattan: Jan. 23, 1939

The Importance of Being Earnest (by Oscar Wilde; produced by Richard Aldrich & Richard Myers) is 44 years old, and looks it. In a way this is a compliment, for most farces of 44 look twice their age. In Wilde’s long stage joke of what happens when one young man invents an invalid friend and another young man invents a dissolute brother, there are still pleasant stretches. Lady Bracknell, “a monster without being a myth,” is still an amusing snob. Miss Prism is still a funny old maid. And Wilde is still the most brilliant epigrammatist in the modern theatre, though for sustained comic dialogue he cannot hold a candle to Shaw.

But The Importance of Being Earnest, talked up in academic circles as the best farce in the English language, everywhere fails to treat its Gilbertian plot with Gilbertian high spirits. As artificial as the Yellowed Nineties which gave it birth, it has the pasty look and studied jauntiness of an elderly fop. The steady ticktock of its epigrams is broken only when one of them happens to chime. As Wilde said of the youthful Max Beerbohm, the gods have endowed the play’s elegant, orchidaceous young men with the gift of perpetual old age.