Theatre
Interview
The importance of being prepared with the cast of …Earnest?
The cast and crew of ...Earnest? talk putting a comedic spin on an Oscar Wilde classic with a complete stranger each night
What happens when you take an Oscar Wilde classic, blow it wide open and put an audience member in the middle of the crossfire? You get …Earnest?, the meticulously choreographed and fearlessly improvised play within a play, where a different audience member takes centre stage and plays the lead character each night. That’s right, an audience member is the star of this show. Devised, produced and led by theatre company Say It Again, Sorry?, …Earnest? follows the story of a group of rag-tag actors and a director putting on the Oscar Wilde comedy as planned, until the lead actor fails to arrive on cue, and they need to find a brave audience member to help keep the play going…
After successful stints at the Pleasance Court Theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe, and now in its sixth year of production, the Say It Again, Sorry? cast and crew are gearing up for their biggest UK tour yet, with their first show on 19 February at the Gordon Craig Theatre in Stevenage.
Ahead of their first show, we caught up with Trynity Silk (Cast/Set Design), Simon Paris (Co-Writer/Producer/Director) and Josh Haberfield (Cast) to hear more about what it takes to perform with a new audience member every night.
Tell us your role in …Earnest? and theatre company
Trynity Silk: I’m one of seven who founded the company. Up until this rendition, I’d done set, costume and props, but for this next leg of our career, we’ve handed costumes over to [Libby Watson]. For this rendition of the show, I’m doing the set design and props, which is essentially going to be our previous set, but upgraded. I perform in the show too – I play the character Jen.
Josh Haberfield: I play Simon Slough, who is the director of the show in the show.
Simon Paris: There is a character in the show, which is Simon the director [Josh Haberfield], and I’m actually Simon, the director. Aside from directing, I also produce the show, and that involves finding the venues, raising the money, and essentially creating the plan for how the show comes to be. And then I also co-write the show with Josh King and the ensemble.
So explain ...Earnest? to someone who’s never heard of it before?
Simon Paris: …Earnest? is about someone putting on the Oscar Wilde play, The Importance Being Earnest. It’s a very traditional version of the show, until the actor, playing Earnest, which is the lead, doesn’t show up. The “director” takes to the stage, apologises to everyone and says “but don’t worry, because one of you are going to do it.” And then he ends up casting a real audience member to star in the show. They get in costume, makeup, microphones, and they are the lead of the show for the entire two and a half hours. Then throughout the show, the rest of the cast all drop out one by one as well, and they’re all replaced by other audience members, until you get to a point where you come back from the interval, the curtain comes up and it’s just eight audience members in the show, no actors, and they’re somehow doing it.
How do you prepare to basically have a cast full of strangers every night? What goes into the directorial and rehearsal process, and the set design?
Josh: In rehearsals, as a team we pretend to be audience members. And so for me, I’ll get to practice what we refer to as “the Earnest ask” [Asking the audience questions to come onto the stage]. There are certain questions I’ll ask – I won’t give them away – and based on various answers, you can begin to piece together what sort of an ‘Earnest’ people will be. However, it does get to a point where, because we’re all quite good friends, we’ve been doing this a while, we begin to learn each other’s personality traits. And that isn’t really representative what we get when we go out. So do open rehearsals where, once a week, we’ll invite anyone to come and join in, and that’s a chance to really work out how how to talk to people, because everyone feels differently about a random man standing on stage, suddenly, directly talking to them.
However, most of the people that come to open rehearsals know a bit about what we’re doing. If I’m honest, there’s no real way of preparing. You just have to be open to whatever the vibe in the crowd is each night.
Trynity: I’m always thinking about how everything works on the set level, and of course, all of it has to go through this filter of ‘there are audience members up on stage’. We’ve meticulously worked out every single element of it, but you throw a human being in there who knows nothing about the show, and every single time, they’ll do something you don’t expect. It’s amazing, but was very scary in the beginning.
But six years in now and doing the show so many times, it’s like our version of jumping out of an airplane. This is our journey, and it’s fantastic because I stand backstage just before the curtain goes up, and I want to vomit every night. It’s like the stage fright, but you live for that feeling. You know what’s coming, but that tension of “who is going to end up with us tonight?”, and “what is going to happen?” is so exciting. They can go really off course but we’re good at just problem solving our way through.
Do you have a favorite kind of ‘Earnest’?
Josh: So I think my favourite kind of ‘Earnest’ is someone who you can see a kindness and a softness in the first moment. It’s really important to have that, because that’s a hard thing to do with strangers. So if they engage with the eye contact, they show a kindness, they’re happy to engage in conversation with you, then you know that that person is going to at least start off on the right foot.
Did you always know that you wanted to do something that would involve an audience member?
Simon: I mainly got interested in this kind of stuff, not through theatre, but through people like Derren Brown, Nathan Fielder, even like Bo Burnham. People that kind of experiment with the audience-actor relationship a bit. But then the actual origin of the show was we got commissioned by a festival called Nozstock Festival to create a walkabout show, and that was called Easel Peasel. And basically the idea for that one was we have a exhibition of paintings to present, but we’ve forgotten all the paintings. So we run around this music festival with an easel and get people to paint one of us in two minutes. Then at the end, we do an exhibition of all of their paintings.
We put a video of it online, and we suddenly got interest from Glastonbury, Wilderness and Latitude. Then the year after, Nozstock asked for a bigger stage production and we thought “What is the Easel Peasel version of a stage production? What’s the version of turning the audience into actors?” And this was kind of the route to …Earnest?.
This is a play that goes wrong. What happens when something actually does go wrong on stage? How do you counter for that?
Josh: Instead of saying “Sorry everyone, we can’t do it tonight”, the director character decides in the spur of the moment, “I know what we’ll do. We’ll find someone in the audience to play the lead role and carry on going.” So no matter what happens, this show has to go right. And I think that’s what bleeds through into the audience members that come up, and they all then help out, because they feel like we’ve got to finish this thing together.
When things go really wrong in real life, which actually, I’ll be completely honest with you, is very rare. That’s because we rehearse every single scenario within an inch of its life, and we learn every time we do the show. There are moments where certain props have to be in certain places for certain jokes to land. However, we have an audience member that has not rehearsed with us before. They might pick up a prop and move it, but that’s okay, because we’ve got eight versions of that same gag depending on where that ends up. So the scene has eight to 10 different routes it can take.
You’re all like Doctor Strange. Was the set design a collaborative effort with the rest of the team? And how much of it was also accessibility driven, because you’re bringing someone in from the audience?
Trynity: It has to be accessible and safe. It also it needs to encapsulate the vision of the character who has directed the show. So it’s quite meta in terms of what it aesthetically looks like as well. And then, of course, because it’s a touring show, it’s going into dozens of different venues so it needs to be somewhat adaptable, and it’s very modular. It can be stripped down into a very basic set, depending on what size theatre we’re at and how difficult it is to do setups. For example, we were on a ship across the transatlantic this year, and we really had to scale it down to its most minimal version.
For the latest iteration of the play, we wanted to try and make it a little bit more intimate, because on our previous tour, it kind of looked like one big, long wall. So we’ve rounded it off to make the set’s shape a more intimate space, because obviously the show has so much to do with connecting with the audience. It’s really important that it feels like we’re all in this together. We’ve rounded it out and we’ve given it some arches on the top, just to make it look a little bit more like a manor house. It’s getting a change of color as well. It’s going from a very bright yellow with a lot of white into quite a mustard yellow with a lot of browns.
How much do you draw on the original Oscar Wilde text to make this production?
Simon: Originally, we saw this as an adaptation of the play. And then over the years, we’ve accepted it’s not an adaptation. It’s a completely new play about someone putting on The Importance Of Being Earnest. And in fact, in our latest rebrand, we did a big name change, which was it used to be called The Importance Of Being… Earnest? And now it’s just called …Earnest? just to highlight that this is a new play entirely.
Trynity: It was really important for us that when those curtains opened for the first time, the stage looked like someone was trying to put on an incredibly traditional play Importance Of Being Earnest. We kind of wanted it to come across as quite stuffy, stiff and wooden in the beginning. It’s like a tension building device where we’re presenting it as very traditional, so when it does break, it’s impactful.
What can audiences expect from this upcoming tour?
Simon: One big thing is that all the costumes are getting completely upscaled and redesigned. And the interesting thing about that is it ups the stakes of the show. When an audience member is in full period costume, you can tell that these aren’t cheap items. This is a full production that you’re in.
My dream for the show, and when I know it will be done, is when we can fly an audience member in.
What do you mean by “fly an audience member in”?
Simon: You know how sometimes actors can fly [on stage], like you see in pantos? I’ll know the show’s reached its final version when we achieve getting an audience member to fly.
