Profile
Photos
Comments
A Daring Take on a Wilde Play
SINGAPORE
— Presenting Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” with an
all-male cast dressed as men has raised a few eyebrows in conservative
Singapore, leading the media regulator to request the company to
prominently display an age advisory of “16 years and above” on all its
publicity material, with the notice, “Re-interpretation, all-male cast.”
The
director, Glen Goei, said he decided to recast the well-known play,
which has several female characters, because he wanted to “celebrate”
Oscar Wilde, a man who “dared to be true to himself and his nature” and
“remind people what he stood for.”
The play was written while
Wilde was having the great love affair of his life with Lord Alfred
Douglas (nicknamed Bosie), which would lead to his downfall. He was
imprisoned for two years after being convicted of “gross indecency”
with other men.
As in Wilde’s other works, this comedy is loaded
with bon mots and satire, but over the years many critics have also
read all sorts of symbolism into the play regarding Wilde’s personal
life and sexual orientation. For example, there has been speculation
that the name Cecily, one of the lead female characters, was a
euphemism for a male prostitute and that the silver cigarette case that
appears early in the first act was a gift typically given to male
prostitutes at the time.
Mr. Goei’s staging of the play has
particular resonance in Singapore, where homosexuality is still a
criminal activity, punishable with up to two years in prison under
Section 377A of the penal code, a law dating back to British colonial
days.
The director said he saw all of the characters in the play
as projections of Wilde’s own voice and world. “This play is all about
being true to one’s self,” he said recently while still in rehearsals
for the production, which opened March 25 and runs until April 11.
“Having an all-male cast is not a gimmick, even though the play is very
gendered. It’s about how I read Oscar’s life. He had separated from his
wife and when he wrote the play, his world was surrounded by men. That
was Oscar Wilde’s reality, yet he had to write for a Victorian
conservative society, so he had to write under a very heterosexual
paradigm.”
Mr. Goei found inspiration for this interpretation
from reading “The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde” by Neil McKenna and
“Straight Acting” by Sean O’Connor, a history of British homosexual
playwrights, yet he said he was a bit surprised by the request for an
advisory. “There was another traditional production of this play two
weeks ago with exactly the same text and it didn’t get an advisory,” he
said. “Usually the rating is based solely on the text, but now it’s
based on the interpretation of the text. What is bizarre is that
apparently it would have been O.K. if the men were wearing women’s
clothes and kissing another man, but it’s not if everybody is dressed
as men.”
Amy Tsang, the deputy director of arts and publications
at the Media Development Authority, explained that the parental
advisory is not a restricted rating, but was recommended by the Arts
Consultative Panel, made up of a cross-section of members of the
public, because it felt that “younger audiences, who may not be
familiar with the original play, are likely to be confused about its
content and underlying messages.”
Ms. Tsang said that panel
members felt that the play had “gay undertones” and “may be
inappropriate for a young audience,” adding that some members of the
public had written to MDA to share their concerns about it.
Ms.
Tsang said the advisory was meant only to alert parents and teachers
and gives them the discretion to decide whether they want their
children or charges below that age to view the play. “It is not a
mandatory rating,” she stressed.
Theater in Singapore usually
gets a lot of leeway because of its limited reach, but having an
all-male cast in a tangled romantic comedy is proving a bit more
controversial because of the penal code. Indeed, anything that may be
considered as promoting homosexuality or even suggesting homosexuality
is normal can be punishable. Last year a local cable operator was fined
for airing an episode of a home decorating series that featured the
house of a gay couple and their baby.
While the government has
stated it would not be “proactive” in enforcing Section 377A in cases
of consensual acts that take place in private, the section’s continued
presence provides a focus for gay rights’ campaigners.
“A bit
like having a revolver pointing straight into your head playing Russian
Roulette,” said Mr. Goei, who laments in the show program that young
gay men were either too frightened to sign a campaign to repeal the law
18 months ago or felt there was no need, since the authorities have
said it will not be enforced.
In “The Importance of Being
Earnest,” the plot centers around Algernon Moncrieff and Jack
Worthington, who have separately invented false identities to escape
unwelcome social obligations. Moncrieff pretends to visit a sick friend
in the country whenever he wants to escape London while Worthington,
who takes care of his ward Cecily while he is in the country, assumes
the identity of Ernest — his fictitious black-sheep younger brother —
whenever he is in London. During one of his visits to the city,
Worthington meets Moncrieff and soon professes his love for Moncrieff’s
cousin, Gwendolen. Moncrieff, intrigued by Worthington’s double life
and in particular with his description of Cecily, sets out to meet her
and takes on the role of Ernest to woo her.
Though Mr. Goei
deliberately selected an all-male cast, he has not changed Wilde’s text
or the names of the characters. He acknowledges that simply putting the
actors in men’s clothes adds a new layer of interpretation to the text.
“I don’t like the idea of dressing the men in women’s clothes,” he
said. “The play is already camp, very tongue in cheek, and I think
putting men in women’s clothes would push it overboard.”
He
added: “If you study Wilde’s work, his was a creed of tolerance and
celebrating the individual. His three earlier plays are all about
women, but women with a past, with a bit of history and women that
decide their own route. He always identified the struggle of gay men
with the struggle of women at the time because women didn’t have rights
and equal opportunities.”