2027-28 Proposal: A Woman of No Importance

A Woman of No Importance

By Oscar Wilde

Directed & adapted by Rachel Kohler

Show Synopsis 

The friendly and kind widow Lady Hunstanton throws a party at her charming manor home in the English countryside for a group of people she would especially like to know one another–a young visiting American, a member of parliament, a few rich and attractive friends…you know, the usual mix. She’s also invited the witty and devastatingly debonair Lord Illingworth, a nobleman with an excitingly checkered past. One of the love affairs of his youth resulted in a child born out of wedlock, and when he refused to marry the child’s mother, she fled, living under an assumed name for twenty years. Unbeknownst to both Illingworth and his ex-lover, they are about to meet again after two decades.

Vision Statement: “I am disgraced: he is not. That is all. It is the usual history of a man and a woman as it usually happens, as it always happens. And the ending is the ordinary ending. The woman suffers. The man goes free.”

We should not still be having this conversation.

In the Year of Our Lord 2026, this should have been settled long ago, this casual acceptance of dishonorable behavior in the men who hold a high status in our society, this double standard of acceptable conduct between rich and poor, between men and people of other genders. However... gestures broadly at the political and social landscape. So here we are. Looking at a play written over 130 years ago, harping upon this same depressingly relevant theme.

A Woman of No Importance is certainly one of the oddest of Oscar Wilde's theatrical endeavors. Premiering in 1893, the play was moderately well-received by its original audience. Modern critics have been less kind, considering the play to be uneven in pacing, erratic in tone, and melodramatic in nature. It is consequently performed relatively rarely in comparison to Wilde's more popular works, which are typically written in his usual modus operandi of incisively witty comedies of manners. While A Woman of No Importance opens with Wilde's customary war of wits fought with wry British quips that simultaneously celebrate and lampoon aristocratic society, the play spirals unexpectedly from social comedy into domestic tragedy. This uncharacteristic descent into serious drama is considered by many critics to be merely banal, "stale convention."

I take great pleasure in regarding the disdain of critics as a theatrical challenge. Reviving an oft-neglected play brings unique rewards. Part of my impetus for choosing this particular play is its unusual proliferation and relative dominance of fully-realized female characters, but I found myself equally fascinated by the abrupt juxtaposition of the dazzling wit of the Victorian aristocracy in stark contrast to the bitter misery of Mrs Arbuthnot and the fact that Lord Illingworth somehow manages to be both the most exquisite of dandies and the most despicable of villains. (Plus, this play ends with one of the greatest theatrical punchlines / sickest burns in human history. The final line makes the whole play worth it. Read it and revel in Lord Illingworth’s deeply deserved takedown.)

I have lightly adapted the script to cut it for length and to slightly expand the minor roles that are intended to represent a cross-section of the kinds of men that can be found in “polite” English society. These characters are intended to contrast with the ostensible lack of respectability of Mrs. Arbuthnot’s past. The first three acts soundly prove Wilde’s thesis that a set of pompous, useless gadflies and pontificators are considerably less beneficial to society than a kind and conscientious “fallen woman” like Mrs. Arbuthnot or a “boring” Puritan like Hester. My changes were not necessarily out of any weakness in Wilde’s script (though I did remove some of the religious references that might have been off-putting or inscrutable to a modern audience), but rather to ensure that some of the male-presenting roles other than Lord Illingworth had a little more meat to them.

This is another reason I particularly like this script—the roles for female-presenting performers are considerably better and more numerous than the roles on offer for men, a relative rarity in classical theatre. Each woman in this play is a much more robustly drawn character than almost all of the men, something that Wilde clearly did on purpose to drive home his points about gendered hypocrisy in societal norms, so this is great for both the themes of the play and our large population of non-male actors. In addition, several of the largest roles are written for women middle-aged or older. Femme roles for those age brackets are irritatingly few and far between, so I am pleased to be able to offer some very good ones.

Finally, to be clear—this play has some very serious and relevant things to say, but it’s still Oscar Wilde. It’s very funny. It’s witty people saying eminently quotable witty things and pompous people being amusingly insufferable for two hours, with an occasional emotional gut punch thrown in for variety. (There are also a lot of British people making scathing jokes about America, which is never not ironic and funny.) 

So I guess, if we DO have to have this conversation (again...and again...and again), let's do it in pretty dresses and silly RP accents. That'll make it more bearable for everyone.