Outside the Blue Box: The Importance of Being Earnest (2025)

Welcome to a new feature in which a rotating cast of Geek Show writers look at what the stars, writers and directors of Doctor Who get up to outside the show. We gave you a little taster of this last Christmas, but for the full experience we recommend signing up to our Patreon, the only place where you can get access to every single article in this series. As well as casting a new light on some of Doctor Who‘s all-time icons, it also allows us to take a look at corners of culture The Geek Show doesn’t usually cover. This week, that means a trip to the theatre…

Unlike science fiction fandom, theatre fandom doesn’t get into arguments about authorial intent or canon. Part of this is because it’s more heavily influenced by literary criticism, a form which has been tracking the slow death of the author for nearly sixty years now. Most importantly, though, such critiques wouldn’t make sense in a theatre context. When part of a science fiction show or movie franchise changes, the immediate anxiety among fans is that this will be set in stone as the way things are from now on. Whereas if some tyro theatre director puts a radical new spin on a popular classic, there’ll almost certainly be a more faithful version staged before the year is out. Nothing is permanent, everything is permitted, and the only path to immortality is being good enough to earn it.

This is not wholly different to how Doctor Who fandom operates, once the initial wailing and gnashing of teeth subsides. Even those changes to the show’s lore or style that are decried as heresies tend to get absorbed painlessly into the flow of the series given enough time. Being the Doctor is the closest thing television has to a classic theatrical role, where there are certain set parameters in the text but otherwise each actor has leeway to make it their own. When Ncuti Gatwa first appears on stage in Max Webster’s National Theatre production of The Importance of Being Earnest, he’s playing ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ on the piano, while wearing a pink ballgown that he then strips off until he’s in his underwear. Did Oscar Wilde intend his play to start with a Ncuti Gatwa thirst-trap? The answer is clearly no. Would he have objected to it? The answer is equally clearly no.

You don’t need to have a BA in queer theory to recognise how Wilde’s story, about two respectable gentlemen who indulge their flirtatious sides away from home under false identities, was inspired by his own sexuality. The Importance of Being Earnest is a comedy of manners, which is to say a comedy of mostly bad manners, one which pays impeccable attention to the surfaces and snobberies of English high society while also sticking the knife into it. Algernon and Jack’s first attempt to win themselves a happy ending involves using religion – specifically baptism – as a tool of deception. The precocious Cecily declares that rather than study the links between capital and labour she has in fact found a stronger link between capital and laziness. Her governess Miss Prism declares, aghast, that this is socialism, the subject of perhaps Wilde’s most celebrated essay.

So before asking if Webster is subverting anything in Wilde’s play, we first have to ascertain whether Wilde has left him anything to undermine. Quite possibly not. And it’s here where I have to admit that, despite loving Wilde’s sole novel, his children’s stories, essays and poetry, the comic plays have always been a step too far in the direction of pure archness for my taste. The farces I most enjoy – such as those by Wilde’s acolytes Noel Coward and Joe Orton – are the ones with an edge of genuine risk at the heart of the narrative. By contrast, nothing is really at stake in The Importance of Being Earnest. This is by design. The central plot revolves around two women deciding they can’t marry someone with a dull name. It’s a funny and deliberate self-satire of Wilde’s own commitment to aesthetics – this is, remember, someone whose last words reportedly involved criticising the interior decor – but it doesn’t persuade you that any great love will be lost if this dilemma can’t be resolved.

Part of the reason why Gatwa works so well in the role of Algernon is that his impishness feels like it evolved to fit this environment. Gatwa is a remarkably emotionally available actor even in mediums where he can’t shoot the audience a knowing look, which he frequently does here. We feel – even if we came in too late to see the striptease – as if he’s flirting with us, and we respond to that much as Cecily does. The thrill of it all makes the superficiality feel not just forgivable but enjoyable.

It’s not a one-man show. It’s not even a one-Doctor-Who-star show; Julian Bleach plays Algernon’s butler with even more cadaverous affect than he brought to the role of Davros. Elsewhere, Eliza Scanlen resurrects the near-psychotic girlishness of Miranda Richardson’s Queenie as Cecily and Ronke Adekoluejo adds touches of surprising sexual hunger to Gwendolen, a hunger you suspect the rather fey Jack will struggle to satisfy. Hugh Skinner has a lot of fun as that aforementioned suitor; at one point in the NT Live broadcast shown in cinemas, he nearly makes Gatwa corpse with an apparent ad-lib.

The play’s most famous role, indeed one of the most famous roles in the history of comic theatre, is Lady Bracknell. She’s played here by Sharon D. Clarke, the theatrical legend who had a recurring role as Grace O’Brien during Jodie Whittaker’s time on Doctor Who. Rather than the highly-strung, highly-pitched English grande dame the role is often caricatured as, Clarke’s Bracknell is a domineering Jamaican matriarch, her voice dropping rather than rising several octaves to cry “A handbag?” It’s a wholly original spin on the role that gets laughs out of lines that haven’t traditionally been seen as woofers. And yet underneath the originality, it’s also a perfectly recognisable, drawn-from-life comedy type that feels suitably warm and familiar for this most warm and familiar of plays.

The casting of Gatwa, Clarke and Adekoluejo is a practice less controversial in theatre than it is in other art forms. It’s commonly referred to as “colour-blind casting”, though that doesn’t quite describe what’s happening here. Had Gatwa and Skinner swapped roles, Algernon’s jokey snobbery towards Jack might have come across as racial prejudice; forget what Wilde intended, that would be quite against what Webster intends. Fortunately they’re ideally cast for these roles, and you just accept the presence of a Scottish-Rwandan man in the Victorian aristocracy as a theatrical contrivance. Except that’s not exactly what’s going on, either. Gatwa isn’t above drawing attention to his race when, for instance, Algernon casts the audience a knowing look after Cecily asks if his hair is naturally curly. As with Clarke’s authentically Black Lady Bracknell, the production wants you to notice race when it’s funny and ignore it when it isn’t. Like the insanely extra curtain call the show ends with, it’s another instance of Webster being true to the spirit, if not the letter, of the play. 

Graham’s Archive – Outside the Blue Box: The Importance of Being Earnest