Stage Struck

How much wit is too much, asks PETER CRAWLEY

CAN A play be too witty? At the moment, in a theatre abounding with carefully chosen quips and diamond-cut epigrams, stage dialogue can seem too clever by half.

"Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?" begins The Importance of Being Earnest, now at the Gaiety. "I didn't think it polite to listen, sir," replies the butler. Oscar Wilde starts as he means to continue, stacking witticisms upon each other, constructing something a little less like a dialogue and a little more like one-upmanship.

Everyone remembers the choicest cuts from Earnest: "To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness." But that line speaks volumes about the comedy of manners, where every line is polished until it shines and honest emotion is subordinated to aloof humour. "Say your lines and don't bump into the furniture," that other shining wit, Noel Coward, advised his actors. Listen carefully and laugh on cue might be his accompanying instruction to the audience.

A little wit goes a long way. A few bons motswill make a play surge and sing. Too many, and the smiling strains your cheeks. You start to crave the roughness of less-considered dialogue, the inarticulacy and poor posture of actual humanity. Wilde's plays even seem slightly annoyed when the plot forces a line that wouldn't look at home on a greetings-card inscription. There's something more generous to dialogue left blank for our own message.

At first, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, at the Gate, almost tries to out-Wilde Wilde. In the first 10 lines there are almost as many witticisms. Just one is archly important to the plot: “Septimus, what is carnal embrace?” asks a sexually curious 11-year-old. “Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef,” replies her meat lover.

Is it coincidental that a later line both nails the formula of witticisms and politely suggests the characters knock off the word play? “As her tutor you have a duty to keep her in ignorance,” complains one character. “Do not dabble in paradox, Edward,” is the response, “it puts you in danger of fortuitous wit.” That killer put-down couldn’t be more like Lady Bracknell if Stockard Channing turned up to the wrong theatre. But it also allows Stoppard’s dialogue to slip into something more comfortable.

It's not for nothing that Shakespeare put his most pithy phrases into the mouths of fools. Like Touchstone, currently treading the cobbles in As You Like Itin Trinity College, they defuse the artificial cleverness because they never quite seem aware of what they're saying.

Nietzsche thought that wit was “the epitaph of an emotion” – memorable but cold – while Lacan saw witticisms as spontaneous, but devastatingly accurate. Shakespeare seemed to anticipate both. “Thou speak’st wiser than thou art ware of,” Rosalind tells Touchstone after another display of fortuitous wit. “I shall ne’er be ware of mine own wit till I break my shins against it,” comes the reply.

He took the words right out of our mouths.