The importance of being earnest

‘To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness …’Coming on 6 September 2002, the team behind An Ideal Husband brings us a sumptuous classic adaptation of one of Oscar Wilde’s most famous and popular plays, The Importance of Being Earnest.Colin Firth, Rupert Everett, Reese Witherspoon and Dame Judi Dench as the indomitable Lady Bracknell, bring The Importance of Being Earnest alive in this new film from Fragile Films, releasing from Buena Vista International.Oscar Wilde’s brilliant play makes fun of the English upper classes with light-hearted satire and dazzling humour. It is 1890’s England and two young gentlemen are being somewhat limited with the truth. To inject some excitement into their lives, Mr Worthing invents a brother, Earnest, as an excuse to leave his dull country life behind him to pursue the object of his desire, the ravishing Gwendolyn. While across town Algernon Montecrieff decides to take the name Earnest, when visiting Worthing’s young ward Cecily. The real fun and confusion begins when the two end up together and their deceptions are in danger of being revealed.As Wilde wrote of his most famous play:’It is exquisitely trivial, a delicate bubble of fancy, and it has its philosophy … that we should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.’The Importance of Being Earnest is directed by Oliver Parker and produced by Barnaby Thompson.