The Sunday Age, Melbourne
Bill Perrett
April 23 2006
Ridiculusmus have been here before; in the 2004 Melbourne International Comedy Festival, they performed their wonderfully weird piece, Ideas Men, in which the actors swapped parts and genders and wore their clothes backwards. This seems to be something of a trademark, because in their production of Oscar Wilde’s classic, they also do all those things. They have to, because they play all the parts. That is at least part of the point of the show, although Jon Haynes (the other half of the duo being David Woods) says they’ve always done multiple-role pieces, mainly out of “economic necessity, not out of a desire to show off”. Well, maybe. Here, an important source of the comedy is not just Wilde’s sublime but almost too-well-known script, but also the mechanics of keeping the characters on stage. In the end, it’s as though they’ve nearly given up – the effort of switching costumes and personae reduces them to holding dresses in front of their torsos, or sitting around in their underwear. In the interim, they resort to hand puppets and a talking butler’s head on a platter. The division of the characters has Haynes as Algernon, his sedulously neat cousin, Gwendolen, and Miss Prism, governess with a past. Woods is Jack Worthing, Lane, Algernon’s manservant, Chasuble the vicar and, quite wonderfully, the smouldering, adolescent Cecily, Worthing’s ward. They take turns as the formidable Lady Bracknell.
Ridiculusmus’ The Importance of Being Earnest is as funny and stylish as Oscar could have wanted, while giving audiences another way of experiencing it. There are some slightly out-of-era props; a CD player, and a tapestry-covered fridge (for the cucumber sarnies). There’s a hilarious melange of musical and dance styles. The costumes become characters in their own right; Zoe Atkinson’s design is marvellous. If there is a star among the millinery, it has to be Lady Bracknell’s daunting, poultry-crowned number. Jude Kelly has directed wittily and subtly, and Woods and Haynes are excellent. Some will prefer them in pieces of their own devising, but this is an intelligent and funny entertainment.
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