Review by Susanne Dahn
Bloomshed is an award-winning Melbourne-based independent theatre company with years of form re-energising, re-contextualising and re-inventing literary classics. They’ve punked-up Paradise Lost, neo-narrated The Nose and added anarchy to Animal Farm.
Now they’ve revitalised Oscar Wilde’s silly drawing room comedy for serious people The Importance of Being Earnest adding quite a bit of Oscar to it which, even if not to him, is to us, the contemporary audience, if not the most entertaining, very much the most interesting bit.
Bloomshed works are collectively created by the Bloomshed team and are executed with excitement, energy, wit and nuance using both scalpels and sledgehammers. Earnest is no exception. It’s a fun, fabulous, fruity romp with added depth for those who care to seek it.
This piece is such a gift for Bloomshed’s love of comedy. There are plentiful opportunities for physical comedy - standouts are the greetings between the characters, the dance moves, the bonus yoga poses, the tricycle scene, the interruptus scene with Oscar’s wife Constance and the fabulous changing and chucking clothes about the stage scenes. Nathan Burmeister and Samantha Hastings take well deserved credit for Set and Costume Design - special hat tip for Lady Bracknell’s Aunty Jack boxing glove. The dialogue comedy is brilliant too - Constance enquiring Is that my dress ? Throughout the piece Bloomshed ensures the dialogue is positively drowning in your gist.
Jacinta Anderson is Stage and Production Manager and uses the device of Act Drop to great effect. John Collopy as Lighting Designer also uses candle light on the set to great effect. Standout creative contribution is also the sound design by Justin Gardam which reaches its pinnacle in the sacred music just before the sprinklings in Act 3.
The on-stage performers in this piece are James Jackson as Algernon and Oscar and he is superb - able to fully inhabit cockiness, power and privilege one minute and exhaustion, despair and disappointment the next. Jackson is a great physical actor with wonderful face and and eye control and his voice commmand is magnificent.
Tom Molyneux also stuns in his virtuosity - he is simply wonderful as manservant Lane, devilish as the Reverend and utterly outstanding as Lady Bracknell. A joy to watch.
Hayley Edwards is Jack Worthing in their debut for Bloomshed. Hayley expertly nails Jack’s uncertainty of identity and provenance and is delightful in both comic and dramatic sleeves. What a welcome addition to the Bloomshed ensemble.
Elizabeth Brennan - can we ever get enough of this glorious performer? - appears as Gwendolyn, Cecily, Miss Prism and Constance. Brennan glitters and possesses the stage (even when she’s getting changed at the side of it) and is a theatrical wonder to behold.
Such brilliant acting chops among these four performers. See this play if you still can. See any Bloomshed work if you can.
I love the way Bloomshed allowed Oscar to actually be with us in this play - in the cracks between the Acts and in the body of the work. Yes most people ARE other people’s mimics but Oscar entirely invented himself. Yes he posed at a thing or two as well, but he was also unrepentantly himself and steadfast that he should be free to be so. He did make the world sparkle and they did remove his name from the theatres. But they couldn’t make that last. Oscar, it was so lovely to see you with Bloomshed, we’ll never erase your name.
Image Supplied
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