Before anyone speaks a line of dialogue in The Importance of Being Earnest, a dandy gentleman in a fancy hot-pink suit steps out from the wings, plucks a flower, and pins it to his lapel.
The audience will soon learn that he is none other than Algernon Moncrieff, who will insist that his outfit is “utterly and entirely unbecoming” without a buttonhole. This small gesture sets the tone for how director Krista Jackson will present this most quotable of comedies: as a world where nature exists to be cut, collected, arranged, and displayed as proof of taste—by people who (to paraphrase Lady Bracknell in the play) “have nothing, but look everything”. In Jackson’s delightful production, which is playing to packed houses at the Avon Theatre, this throwaway moment of vanity is the play’s philosophy in miniature: a motif that is elaborated in the set, the wall colours and the costumes, and is embodied to perfection by the cast.
Oscar Wilde’s beloved and oft-performed comedy needs little introduction. In it, two aristocratic young men, John Worthing (Joe Perry) and the aforementioned Algernon Moncrieff (Carter Gulseth), maintain invented alter egos, in order to escape social obligation. Worthing poses as “Ernest” in London, but operates as himself in the country, where he is guardian to 18-year-old ward Cecily Cardew (Marissa Orjalo). Meanwhile, Moncrieff has invented a chronically unwell friend named Bunbury, in order to duck various unwanted engagements. As the show opens, Worthing has arrived in town hoping to marry Gwendolen Fairfax (Allison Lynch), whose formidable mother Lady Bracknell (Fiona Reid) balks at the engagement, when Worthing confesses that he does not know who his real parents are. Cecily and Gwendolyn, meanwhile, are each pursuing their own Ernest: they claim that the name (not the man) “inspires absolute confidence “. When Moncrieff decamps to the country in the guise of the fictional Ernest, the two men’s fabrications and the young ladies’ aspirations collide—with Miss Prism (Lucy Peacock) and Rev. Canon Chasuble (Ben Carlson) rounding out the confusion.
Vivid design
The production makes its argument about the gap between appearance and reality through vivid design. Set designer Bretta Gerecke lines the front of the stage with a bed of vibrabt blooms, doubled by a black, semi-transparent scrim printed with bright flowers. The set of the interior scenes is stylishly sparse: white furniture set against brightly painted walls. In the first scene, set in Algernon’s London drawing room, the back rose-pink wall features a floor-to-ceiling display of wall-mounted curios such as an hourglass and a French horn, as well as taxidermied animal heads and antlers. It signals and satirizes this world of accumulated—and indiscriminate—markers of wealth and status.
The outdoor set of Worthing’s country home further elaborates this idea of ostentatious display: this time, with flowers arranged in two huge urns, and two lazily inviting garden swings at the side. Costume designer Cory Sincennes extends the floral conceit to the women, whose exquisitely ornamental and brightly-hued Victorian outfits draw the eye and become a focal point. Gwendolen’s amber marigold gives way to lilac by Act Two, while Cecily’s dress recalls a fuscia peony. And Lady Bracknell’s sleeves—so vast that they make her seem larger than life—shift from a vine green in the first act to the fierce orange of a tiger lily in the second. Even the pink of Algernon’s ensemble in the opening scene gives him the aura of a hothouse flower.
A garden of artifice
The foliage-centricity of the costuming and set is a reminder that the Victorian garden, like the society that created it, was natural only in its raw material. Gardeners (here played by Matthew Kabwe and Landon Nesbitt) disciplined nature into legibility by sculpting, colour-coordinating and endlessly weeding it, in order to fashion artifice that advertised their owners’ wealth, leisure and refinement.
Dressing Gwendolen, Cecily, and Lady Bracknell as living specimens makes that logic explicit: the production cultivates its women for display, in a marriage market that prizes the surface—just as thoroughly as any award-winning garden values symmetry. The men, notably, undergo a different type of grooming, focused on idleness and freedom from useful occupation. The same uselessness that makes a plucked ornamental flower more visible and valuable than a wild one is precisely what qualifies Worthing and Moncrieff as suitable husbands.
Meanwhile, servants Lane (Sean Arbuckle) and Merriman (Liam Tobin) occupy a subtle tier of the same hierarchy: they appear only when needed to support their employers’ various preposterous lies, and their unscripted business between scenes (which I will not spoil) ranks among the production’s sharpest comic touches.
Performances
The performances Jackson cultivates are striking and sharp. Reid’s towering Lady Bracknell resists caricature, delivering her judgments with a dry precision that makes the character’s absurd logic seem, at least in the moment, entirely reasonable. As the two would-be Ernests, Perry and Gulseth build a giddy, bickering rapport that carries the play’s early scenes, while Lynch and Orjalo’s Act Two tea-table sparring—all frozen smiles, needling courtesy and false histories—supplies the production’s comic high point. And Peacock brings a fussy warmth to Miss Prism, which pays off handsomely, once her backstory surfaces.
Lighting designer Imogen Wilson keeps everything crisp and sunlit. Jackson stages her transitions between indoor drawing room and outdoor garden behind the scrim, but in full view of the audience. The choice suits the material: watching the machinery of the change, rather than hiding it, underscores just how thin the membrane is between the actors’ performances and the stagecraft producing them. It’s a sly bit of formal honesty in a story about characters who work very hard to conceal their own scene changes.
Jackson describes in the Director’s note, how she hopes to augment Wilde’s satire of British gentility with a celebration of “the freedom to live as deliciously as our hearts and minds will allow.” This generosity of spirit shows throughout the production, which is more interested in revelling in pleasurable silliness than in punishing its characters’ hypocrisies and shallowness. Jackson’s direction doesn’t reinvent this beloved play so much as allow its existing ironies and abundant laughs to bloom a little more colourfully and vibrantly.
Wilde called his play “a trivial comedy for serious people.” Taking that credo quite seriously, Jackson’s Stratford revival has the good sense to cultivate a splendid triviality that looks everything … and even manages to mean a little.
Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest runs at the Stratford Festival’s Avon Theatre through October 23, 2026. Tickets are available at stratfordfestival.ca.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
