…Earnest? – Richmond Theatre

Celebrating 130 years of Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest, Say It Again, Sorry? offer up their own chaotic twist – part homage, part catastrophe.  Oscar Wilde meets The Play That Goes Wrong – a heady blend of farce, improv, and gentle audience manipulation.

…Earnest? begins as normal: a servant considers it rude to listen to the piano, then cucumber sandwiches – but then the doorbell rings and Earnest is loudly announced… Yet now, the door stays closed and no one arrives. A quick interruption from the director fills some time while the cast of the play-within-a-play try to figure out how the show will keep going. The answer is simple: an audience member will join them on stage to stand in for the missing actor.

When funny, …Earnest? is hilariously funny. When the humour lands and the audience volunteers shine, the show is sublime. By the end of the show, there are seven audience members on stage playing roles and costumed up. It’s a daring piece of work, with the professionals having to improvise and work around whatever happens on stage. Some of it can be easily predicted, and gags can be built around Wilde’s story – but in other moments it’s quick thinking from the team that keeps the show moving. Notably, Josh Haberfield as director Simon Slough occasionally directs the participants from the stalls, keeping things on track and brilliantly playing the sense of frustration and desperation, fully embracing that the show must go on.

It’s also a show that relies heavily on its volunteers from the audience. As people are selected via relevant questions – acting history, familiarity with the play – and somewhat less relevant ones (favourite flavour of ice cream), there’s a skill in finding something within the response that suggests they’ll be game. There was gold in Richmond in both the volunteers for Earnest (all 6’7″ of him) and Cecily (whose ad libs had the ‘director’ shouting from the stalls). The purely random picks, where it’s simply a point at a person in the audience, can understandably lead to less impassioned performances. That said, when an audience member embraces it and makes the cast corpse, reading the cue cards out with gusto – it’s gloriously funny, bringing tears of laughter at least twice.

At the mention of audience participation, you might be running screaming, but there is a gentle joy in this. The jokes are never at the participants’ expense. In fact, …Earnest? is generous to its guests, letting them shine; they get many of the best lines, the best moments, and share the full curtain call. Actually, …Earnest? is generous to its own cast too. Everyone gets a moment or two and a warm reaction from the audience (even if that might be pantomime booing!). It’s a big, warm, funny bear hug of a show.

There’s something genuinely thrilling about not knowing what’s going to happen next – not in a twisty, plot-driven way or even the artificial chaos of the play-within-a-play – but in the sense that the cast always has to be aware of the danger their random volunteer might bring. A moment where a volunteer is asked to pick a couple from the audience “with sexual tension” and replies, “how about the father and daughter there,” leaves audience and cast agog – a line that fits the show’s promise of never being the same show twice to a tee!

…Earnest? bottles up this unpredictability and then spills it all over the stage – cue cards dropped, scripts flying, people walking into doors – and somehow, that glorious mess becomes magic.

…Earnest? will perform at the Richmond Theatre until June 14th, before playing Ed Fringe. https://earnestshow.co.uk/

Reviewer: Dave Smith

Reviewed: 12th June 2025

North West End UK Rating: