This Day in Theater History

February 14, 1895 – Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest opened in London at the St. James Theatre—appropriately enough, for this rather bent love story, on Valentine’s Day. The farce was reduced from four acts to three, at the insistence of the St. James’ producer-manager, George Alexander.

But, unlike the disastrous Henry James drama, Guy Domville, which Alexander had produced only the month before, Wilde’s comedy of manners was a roaring success, the moment when all his subversive wit and wordplay coalesced into the theatrical equivalent of a light but perfect soufflé. Like fellow Irish Protestant George Bernard Shaw, he tweaked British Victorian values from his standpoint as an outsider.

With An Ideal Husband still running at the Theatre Royal in Haymarket, the young writer who had told an American customs official, “I have nothing to declare but my genius,” had finally made good on his boast.

It was also, alas, to be Wilde’s last hour of triumph. The Marquess of Queensbury (yes, the same man who drew up those famous boxing rules), the father of Wilde’s feckless young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, was so enraged by his son’s relationship that he had planned to show up at the play’s opening and ruin the proceedings. Wilde got wind of the idea and had the irate parent banned from the theater. Instead, Queensbury left a calling card on the board at the gentleman’s club that Wilde frequented: “To Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite.”

Instead of laughing off the feeble spelling, Wilde took Douglas’ insane advice and swore out a warrant for Queensbury’s arrest on a charge of libel. In the ensuing sensational trial, Queensbury’s attorney, Sir Edward Carson (later, the intransigent opponent of the Irish Free State), demonstrated—through Wilde’s indiscreet correspondence with Douglas and a parade of witnesses that prominently featured young boys patronized by the playwright—that Queensbury’s charge was true.

Wilde lost his case and ended up in Reading Gaol, where his health was broken. He died five years after the premiere of his greatest play. Several variations have been given of his final words: "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go" (my favorite), "I am dying beyond my means," and, "I can’t even afford to die."

Though I had read much of Wilde’s writings, I never knew about the missing act in The Importance of Being Earnest until, in the fall of 2000, I attended a rare performance with this section restored at the marvelous Stratford Festival in Canada. The repertory company mounted the play in the centennial year of Wilde’s death.

Superficially, Alexander’s instinct to cut the play was correct – the additional section, lodged between what became the second and third acts of the revision, did nothing to advance the plot. But plot is hardly the reason for being of a Wilde comedy—it’s the wonderful lines. And this had them in abundance.

Moreover, this act includes plot twists ironic in light of what was about to happen to Wilde. It features a bill coming due and an arrest, almost as if Wilde sensed that his increasingly open life of “feasting with panthers” would exact a price.

You may have noticed that I’ve referred to the play’s “missing act.” Don’t I mean “discarded”? Well, no—for years after Wilde’s death, the act was nowhere to be found. Then, in 1953, it was rediscovered in, of all places—drumroll, please—New Jersey. (Don’t ask me how it got there!) The 2002 film, starring Colin Firth, Reese Witherspoon, Rupert Everett and Frances O’Connor, featured the restored act.