The play’s trick mirror of a plot hangs on two bachelors living double lives: the rakish Algernon (Gatwa), who’s invented a sickly friend in the country named Bunbury to escape stifling St James’s society, and justice of the peace Jack (Skinner), who assumes the guise of Ernest whenever he leaves Hertfordshire in order to carouse without judgement. Complicating this caper: the fact that Jack’s chosen fiancé, the fashionable Gwendolen (Adékoluéjó), only knows him as his alter ego, while his capricious ward, Cecily (Scanlen), is determined to marry this Ernest whose “scrapes” she’s heard so much about. When all four collide at Jack’s country estate on a clear July afternoon like this one, highly entertaining chaos ensues, much to the chagrin of Gwendolen’s mother Lady Bracknell (Clarke), a whalebone-corseted model of “respectability” previously embodied by Judi Dench and Maggie Smith.
Yet today, the atmosphere on set is far from oppressively genteel. Rehearsals will only begin in October, and Gatwa and I descend to the piano nobile to find the rest of the cast making each other’s acquaintance in a manner that might well have had Lady Bracknell brandishing a crucifix. Olivier-winning Clarke is holding court in the center of the room while clutching a tiny portable fan, her purple braid swaying in its breeze. “I’m a menopausal woman, and I will sweat at the drop of a hat,” she declares to a giggling Scanlen, who’s wearing a pair of go-go boots that are more Veruschka than Queen Victoria, while East End-born Adékoluéjó is demonstrating a recent mastery of Gwendolen’s Received Pronunciation that would make Eliza Doolittle proud. Gatwa quickly rushes over to Skinner, who’s leaning against a marble Adams fireplace having just done a near-perfect imitation of a Grindr notification (“Brrr-up! Looking for a third…”), and with that, this sexually liberated tableaux is complete.
It’s hard to imagine a group better suited to bringing out what Webster calls the “coded fabulousness” of Earnest with campy abandon. To the average straight-laced theatergoer sitting in St James’s in 1895, Wilde’s production would have read as a farcical romantic comedy played out over cucumber sandwiches. For those familiar with Wilde and his chosen demimonde, however, it represented three acts’ worth of double entendres and daring allusions to his younger aristocratic lover Alfred “Bosie” Douglas. Earnest, in fact, had already become accepted slang for homosexual, and if the term “Bunbury” reminds you of something once prohibited under the Sexual Offences Act, rest assured that’s by design. Neither Algernon nor Jack’s sexuality, then, is close to labeled—and, in Webster’s interpretation of Earnest, both Cecily and Gwendolen will buck binaries too. As Scanlen, 25, who has embodied two starkly different versions of girlhood in HBO’s Sharp Objects and Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, tells me, she has every intention of bringing a wealth of “naughtiness” to the role of Jack’s ward—normally styled as a wide-eyed 18-year-old with her “head in the clouds”—including playing up her frisson of erotic tension with Gwendolen during their impromptu tea for two.
