A peek through Oscar's glasses

Conall Morrison's all-male The Importance of Being Earnest at the Abbey Theatre bravely places Oscar Wilde as a character in the play, writes Belinda McKeon.

Conall Morrison knows that directing The Importance of Being Earnest for the Abbey Theatre this month will be a challenge. And it's not because of the offstage drama at the theatre. There's a diamond-cut precision to the humour and intelligence that imbues every line of Oscar Wilde's best-known comedy - and meeting its demands is not optional, but essential. "Sometimes, in a more naturalistic play, if you screw up a line you're not going to notice it," he says, before grimacing. "But if you screw up one of Oscar's polished jewels, you'll know all about it. You can tell when people are getting their lines wrong, because it doesn't chime. Your own paraphrasing is just not going to be as elegant. Because it is the most polished text you're ever going to come across."

Don't get the wrong idea. There are no pairs of fine kid gloves lying around the rehearsal room where Morrison and his cast are readying their Earnest for an audience. Morrison respects the exact architecture of Wilde's writing, but he doesn't regard it as untouchable. In fact, he's touching it, so to speak, much more than any director before him.

Morrison has written a brief prologue to the play that situates Wilde in a Paris bar three months before his death in 1900, at the age of 46. As if in a dream, Wilde - by now downtrodden, but still spouting aphorisms, still sparkling with wit - encounters some of the people he has known in his life, those who have tried to help him and those who have broken him down.

The prologue, played both in English and in French, features none of the most obvious players - Bosie, Wilde's wife Constance, Robbie Ross or the malicious Marquis - but instead surrounds Wilde with figures who act as a key to unlocking his memory of his life and his art. Most particularly they release his memories of the play that became both his triumph and his downfall.

From among their number, the character of Wilde (played in the new production by Alan Stanford) casts the play ahead, exacting a subtle type of revenge as he does so. An acquaintance who snubs him is stuck with the role of Jack, while a gentler type becomes Algy. A loyal, caring friend becomes Canon Chasuble, while one who treats him poorly will be "punished", says the text, with the part of Miss Prism.

Meanwhile, a pair of thieving rent-boys become Gwendolen and Cecily. And no, you haven't read wrongly - in Morrison's version, all the parts of Wilde's play are to be played by men, including Andrew Bennett, Darragh Kelly, Ned Dennehy, Tadhg Murphy, Sean Kearns and Patrick Moy. Courting convention has never been Morrison's way, and the Belfast-born director (who, incidentally, has just been appointed an associate director at the Abbey) is not about to change now.

Still, isn't he nervous? A grimace and a shudder give all the answer that's needed, but Morrison meets the question head-on. "Oh. Oh. I'm very nervous about putting a prologue in front of a play like Earnest, the most elegantly crafted comedy in the English language. It feels immensely cheeky to write something to attach to it, and also it's got a great sense of hubris. But it's all a piece of the way I've always wanted to do it; it's a kind of manifesto, the prologue, for how I want to do it. Getting me and Oscar to lay out our stalls."

Morrison often refers to Wilde in the first person, but there's nothing fawning or vainglorious about the habit; he's simply been living with the playwright in his mind for so long that the sense of an intimate relationship comes naturally.

When Ben Barnes, former artistic director of the Abbey, approached him some time ago seeking a summer show that would be both popular and thought-provoking, Morrison saw his chance to work on a project that he'd had in mind for years. The key was not in the all-male cast but in the wider preoccupation that led Morrison to that idea, among others, for Earnest: a preoccupation with the life of the playwright, and with the way in which that life pervades every moment of the art. Placing Wilde at the head of the play, as a character and as an observer of the action which ensues, is Morrison's way of exploring that relation.

"The idea of viewing it through Oscar's glasses really came to me through years of watching Wilde's plays," he explains. "And just feeling that all the plays were, much more so than a lot of dramatic writing, completely perfumed with his personality. Lady Windermere's Fan and An Ideal Husband are sort of circumscribed by Wilde's biography, by the fact that ultimately society got him, it beat him, and so the great play of his life ended tragically and was, in its own gnarled way, a morality tale.

"But for me, the one where his personality was completely shot though was Earnest. And I don't think that it's any accident that it is, for my money, his greatest play."

Though the play's comic brilliance forms a wall around its deeply personal core, it's clear that Morrison is determined to dig to that core, to reveal Earnest's autobiographical impulse in a fresh way. "It's firstly kind of aspirationally autobiographical, because he would have loved the world to be like that," he says. "You know, completely immoral, a life of leisure, a life of eating and drinking. And all of that fuelling the relentless pursuit of happiness, and your own goals, and love. And as long as you phrase it wittily or paradoxically, absolutely anything goes, you know?"

The play is also autobiographical in a prophetic sense, he believes. "It is shot through with ironic foretellings of his own downfall. A play of double lives, about untruths, about unsympathetic fathers. About revelations. And it includes things like indiscreetly inscribed cigarette cases, several of which were used as evidence to bring him down. Various lines that Oscar, looking back, must have thought, 'Oh my God, I was writing as if I was Cassandra or something.' So I thought that positioning Oscar before the play and looking back on it would highlight that."

Another way in which the play envisions a world that Wilde would have reckoned ideal, of course, is in its entirely male cast. "I see them in terms of Oscar's wish-fulfillment," admits Morrison. "He uses the people in the bar to cast the play, but his ideal casting would consist of all elegant young men, and with him writing the lines. If he could script the world and cast it, he would be happy, and everyone would be beautiful, everyone would be witty, and everyone would ultimately get what they want."

The casting decision was a way of foregrounding the play's strong sexual subtexts, of going deeper than the coded language that already exists in the play - "Earnest" as a 19th-century slang word for homosexuality, "Bunbury" for buggery, and so on. Morrison sees it as a way to bring out the serious and courageous questions that Wilde's play, cloaked in glittering comedy, dared to ask. "It allows us to examine the performative nature of gender, of gender construction," he says. "In terms of people performing prescribed roles, or performing the way that men and women are supposed to perform in society, whereas underneath there's really a suppurating stew of desire and subverisve urgings."

It doesn't do the humour of the play any harm either, of course; watching grown men parade around in corsets and bonnets is a time-tested recipe for laughter. But is Morrison wary that the subtlety of the play could be swallowed up in camp?

"Firstly, I'm very happy to reap any comic rewards," he smiles.

"But with the prologue, the audience will have seen the real face of Oscar's engagement with a gay existence. So while there is great comedy in boys playing girls kissing boys onstage, we know that it is ultimately an illicit game, and that the stakes are high in society. I'm hoping that what will come through, but not in a heavy-handed way, that ultimately, with Wilde remembering back to this, that this is a fantasy. And that this is a world that he could not have, that laid him low. Because he wanted to have boys that he could chat up, kiss, in every role really, and he much preferred male beauty to female beauty."

Although half the cast will be in skirts, there will be no risk of the audience forgetting they are men, says Morrison, and that much is important to his vision of the play.

"He has them in these roles, but their male energy constantly comes through the mask. One of Oscar's lines that keeps coming back to us in rehearsal is, 'Give a man a mask and he'll tell you the truth'. Under the mask, under the gender, there's another truth, a real truth. So hopefully, in its way, it is a comment on the truth or falsity of construction - and also on the gay need, throughout history, and still to an extent today, to hide the true identity of their sexuality underneath it."

Morrison doesn't take a polemical approach to drawing out the echoes of Wilde's world for contemporary audiences, but he believes they are there to be heard.

"I suppose that like Oscar, with this play, I'm hoping to have my cake and eat it. In that I want it to be accessible, funny, popular, and in its own way moving. And I also want, for those who want to decode it that bit further, to think about all the different layers and levels, to have some extra resonances. Because for the gay community, the battle is not won. It's over a hundred years on from when I'm setting this, and the battle is still not won. [Think of] the rise in homophobia and homophobic attacks lately, particularly in the North. And if you think of Oscar casting men in these roles, look at Hollywood and how many stars still cannot come out of the closet. It's far from won. Far from won."

The Importance of Being Earnest opens tonight at the Abbey Theatre and runs until Sept 24