IN 1867, Matthew Arnold wrote in his hugely influential book On the Study of Celtic Literature that "sentimentality, if the Celtic nature is to be characterised by a single term, is the best term to take". Less than 30 years later, Oscar Wilde, who had come under Arnold's influence at Oxford, wrote a play in which the greatest crime of an ineffably English governess, Miss Prism, is to have written a three volume novel of "more than usually revolting sentimentality". Seldom can a pupil have done so much to demolish the ideas of his erstwhile master.
Much of the lasting pleasure of The Importance of Being Earnest, currently to be seen in Patrick Mason's delightful production at the Abbey, lies in its ruthless and inexorable assault on sentimentality in all its forms. Sentimentality is the expression of emotions that are far in excess of the circumstances that have given rise to them. In Earnest we are, from start to finish, in a world where all emotions are wildly excessive.
This is a world where Miss Prism fears for the emotional effect of a chapter on the fall of the rupee on her young charge Cecily. And if fiscal history is potentially melodramatic, what can be said of romance? Algy and Cecily fall madly in love at a moment's notice. Jack becomes deeply upset at the sight of Algy eating all his crumpets. Gwendolen and Cecily decide that what a man is called is much more vital than what he is like. Jack goes into mourning for the death of his non existent brother. And - the true stroke of genius - the only character who remains aloof from this experiment in emotional chaos theory, the bone stable and detached character, Lady Bracknell is madder than all the rest put together.
This satire on sentiment is the reason for the play's longevity and the source of its genuinely subversive force. Since sentimentality has never gone out of fashion, neither will Earnest. And because it goes so deep, the satire is barely affected by changing times. It mocks not just a specific society, but the common shibboleths of all modern societies - marriage, class, romance, parenthood, religion and sex roles.
For a play that glories in triviality and that takes place within the narrowest possible milieu, it thus feels very big. Not for nothing does it have an almost Joycean inclusiveness, working in references to everything from German scepticism to early Christianity, and from the French revolution to Greek mythology.
The question this poses for a director is what do you bring to a play that has everything? In his last production, for the Gate in the late 1980s, Patrick Mason brought a great deal - a set of references to contemporary Thatcherism and a sense of outrage about Wilde's prison sentence for homosexuality. Those parallels made for a sharp and compelling production. What is fascinating, though, is that this time he has achieved an even better production by leaving them out, by carrying through a complete faith in the ability of the comedy itself to tear strips off any set of pretensions and inanities.
This is not to say that he has directed the play at the Abbey in some kind of neutral gear. What he has managed, rather, is to internalise the rage and the satire, to keep them just beneath the surface of a play in which, as Algy says, surface is everything.
He manages this with a fine combination of energy and delicacy. The energy is in the zip and vigour of the playing, the utter conviction of every movement. The delicacy is in the poise and control, the maintenance of the very fine line between two ways of misjudging Wilde's characters. One is the natural tendency of actors to try to find motives for their actions, when the whole point of these people is that they are all effect and no cause. But the other is to make them into caricatures, when those effects, weightless and pointless as they are, have to be played with utter conviction.
THE wonder here is not that some of the actors maintain that poise, but that all of them do so, all of the time. This is one of those productions that gives real meaning to that hoariest of Abbey cliche's - the ensemble - for the whole is consistently more than the sum of the parts.
Rosaleen Linehan's Lady Bracknell stands out, of course. But it is no self serving star turn. Rather than falling for the well worn view of Lady Bracknell as a demented old battle axe, she comports herself like an infallible pope whose every pronouncement is ex cathedra, making her stupidity all the funnier.
And this is never a one woman show. It is all about interactions. And not the least of its acts of sexual subversion is the fact that the real interactions are between members of the same sex. The relationship of Frank McCusker's haplessly bemused Jack to Darragh Kelly's fruity and louche Algy seems much more like a bored marriage than a mere friendship. Alison McKenna's flinty Gwendolen, meanwhile, knocks some sparks off Dawn Bradfield's velvet coated but steely Cecily.
The pleasures of the production, though, is that the currents of suggestion remain where they should be in the air. When we only see the surface, we can imagine all sorts of things in the murky depths beneath. When nothing is made explicit, everything remains possible. And that is the importance of Earnest - for one great moment, before he slipped into the abyss, Oscar Wilde remained perfectly balanced between innocence and outrage and captured that moment in a play that will always be fantastically sly, irresistibly clever and very, very funny.
