Podcasts about being earnest

News from the state's preeminent new play festival, plus Missy Moore's production of K2 at Thunder River and Top 10 Colorado HeadlinersIn this episode of the OnStage Colorado Podcast, hosts Toni Tresca and Alex Miller review their weekend at the annual Colorado New Play Summit at the Denver Center. The two saw readings of four in-development plays and hobnobbed with a cross-section of the Colorado theatre community.Later in the episode, Alex interviews the director and two actors from the play K2, now up at Carbondale's Thunder River Theatre Company.Toni and Alex also run down this week's Top 10 Colorado New Headliners, upcoming shows theatre lovers may want to check out:Happy 2B Nappy, Manos Sagrados, Aurora, through March 1The Roommate, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, through March 1Silent Sky, Durango Theatreworks, through Feb. 22Bakersfield Mist, Thingamajig Theatre at Pagosa Springs Art Center, through March 14The Importance of Being Earnest, Bas Bleu, Fort Collins, Feb. 21-March 8The Secret Garden (musical), Glenwood Vaudeville Review, Feb. 13-March 22My Mother and the Michigan/Ohio War, Miners Alley, Golden, Feb. 20-March 299 to 5 The Musical,Vintage Theatre, Aurora, Feb. 20-March 29Decadent Desires, Wonderbound, Denver, Feb. 26-March 8Fully Commited, Theatre SilCo, Silverthorne, Feb. 27-March 15 

An abbreviated version of the stage play, The Importance of Being Earnest opens this week for the Rexburg Community Theatre

Greg and Dan talk to Kyle Redmon about the upcoming production of “The Importance of Being Earnest”, running February 13th–22nd at the Corn Stock Theatre in Peoria. Kyle plays Jack (aka Earnest) and shares insights about his role, the humor in the show, and his passionate theater background!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this week in reviews, I give a take on both Pillion and The Importance of Being Earnest. films that are totally on different side of the spectrum. One being a classic work of theatrical art, and being offered through the National Theater Live Program, and the other finally crossing the Atlantic to deliver one of the highest rated erotic films eva! Both stimulating, and both well worth the wait.#liviscorner

Hermione Lee is the renowned biographer of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Penelope Fitzgerald, and, most recently, Tom Stoppard. Stoppard died at the end of last year, so Hermione and I talked about the influence of Shaw and Eliot and Coward on his work, the recent production of The Invention of Love, the role of ideas in Stoppard's writing, his writing process, rehearsals, revivals, movies. We also talked about John Carey, Brian Moore, Virginia Woolf as a critic. Hermione is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. Her life of Anita Brookner will be released in September.TranscriptHenry Oliver: Today I have the great pleasure of talking to Professor Dame Hermione Lee. Hermione was the first woman to be appointed Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and she is the most renowned and admired living English biographer. She wrote a seminal life of Virginia Woolf. She's written splendid books about people like Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and my own favorite, Penelope Fitzgerald. And most recently she has been the biographer of Tom Stoppard, and I believe this year she has a new book coming out about Anita Brookner. Hermione, welcome.Hermione Lee: Thank you very much.Oliver: We're mostly going to talk about Tom Stoppard because he, sadly, just died. But I might have a few questions about your broader career at the end. So tell me first how Shavian is Stoppard's work?Lee: He would reply “very close Shavian,” when asked that question. I think there are similarities. There are obviously similarities in the delighting forceful intellectual play, and you see that very much in Jumpers where after all the central character is a philosopher, a bit of a bonkers philosopher, but still a very rational one.And you see it in someone like Henry, the playwright in The Real Thing, who always has an answer to every argument. He may be quite wrong, but he is full of the sort of zest of argument, the passion for argument. And I think that kind of delight in making things intellectually clear and the pleasure in argument is very Shavian.Where I think they differ and where I think is really more like Chekov, or more like Beckett or more in his early work, the dialogues in T. S. Elliot, and less like Shaw is in a kind of underlying strangeness or melancholy or sense of fate or sense of mortality that rings through almost all the plays, even the very, very funny ones. And I don't think I find that in Shaw. My prime reading time for Shaw was between 15 and 19, when I thought that Shaw was the most brilliant grownup that one could possibly be listening to, and I think now I feel less impressed by him and a bit more impatient with him.And I also think that Shaw is much more in the business of resolving moral dilemmas. So in something like Arms and the Man or Man and Superman, you will get a kind of resolution, you will get a sort of sense of this is what we're meant to be agreeing with.Whereas I think quite often one of the fascinating things about Stoppard is the way that he will give all sides of the question; he will embody all sides of the question. And I think his alter ego there is not Shaw, but the character of Turgenev in The Coast of Utopia, who is constantly being nagged by his radical political friends to make his mind up and to have a point of view and come down on one side or the other. And Turgenev says, I take every point of view.Oliver: I must confess, I find The Coast of Utopia a little dull compared to Stoppard's other work.Lee: It's long. Yes. I don't find it dull. But I think it may be a play to read possibly more than a play to see now. And you're never going to get it put on again anyway because the cast is too big. And who's going to put on a nine-hour free play, 50 people cast about 19th-century Russian revolutionaries? Nobody, I would think.But I find it very absorbing actually. And partly because I'm so interested in Isaiah Berlin, who is a very strong presence in the anti-utopianism of those plays. But that's a matter of opinion.Oliver: No. I like Berlin. One thing about Stoppard that's un-Shavian is that he says his plays begin as a noise or an image or a scene, and then we think of him as this very thinking writer. But is he really more of an intuitive writer?Lee: I think it's a terribly good question. I think it gets right at the heart of the matter, and I think it's both. Sorry, I sound like Turgenev, not making my mind up. But yes, there is an image or there is an idea, or there are often two ideas, as it were, the birth of quantum physics and 18th-century landscape gardening. Who else but Stoppard would put those two things in one play, Arcadia, and have you think about both at once.But the image and the play may well have been a dance between two periods of time together in one room. So I think he never knew what the next play was going to be until it would come at him, as it were. He often resisted the idea that if he chose a topic and then researched it, a play would come out of it. That wasn't what happened. Something would come at him and then he would start doing a great deal of research usually for every play.Oliver: What sort of influence did T. S. Elliot have on him? Did it change the dialogue or, was it something else?Lee: When I was working with him on my biography, he gave me a number of things. I had extraordinary access, and we can perhaps come back to that interesting fact. And most of these things were loans he gave them to me to work on. Then I gave them back to him.But he gave me as a present one thing, which was a black notebook that he had been keeping at the time he was writing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and also his first and only novel Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, which is little known, which he thought was going to make his career. The book was published in the same week that Rosencrantz came up. He thought the novel was going to make his career and the play was going to sink without trace. Not so. In the notebook there are many quotations from T. S. Elliot, and particularly from Prufrock and the Wasteland, and you can see him working them into the novel and into the play.“I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be.” And that sense of being a disconsolate outsider. Ill at ease with and neurotic about the world that is charging along almost without you, and you are having to hang on to the edge of the world. The person who feels themself to be in internal exile, not at one with the universe. I think that point of view recurs over and over again, right through the work, but also a kind of epigrammatical, slightly mysterious crypticness that Elliot has, certainly in Prufrock and in the Wasteland and in the early poems. He loved that tone.Oliver: Yes. When I read your paper about that I thought about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern quite differently. I've always disliked the idea that it's a sort of Beckett imitation play. It seems very Elliotic having read what you described.Lee: There is Beckett in there. You can't get away from it.Oliver: Surface level.Lee: Beckett's there, but I think the sense of people waiting around—Stoppard's favorite description of Rosencrantz was: “It's two journalists on a story that doesn't add up, which is very clever and funny.”Yes. And that sense of, Vladimir going, “What are we supposed to be doing and how are we going to pass the time?” That's profoundly influential on Stoppard. So I don't think it's just a superficial resemblance myself, but I agree that Elliot just fills the tone of that play and other things too.Oliver: In the article you wrote about Stoppard and Elliot, the title is about biographical questing, and you also described Arcadia as a quest. How important is the idea of the quest to the way you work and also to the way you read Stoppard?Lee: I took as the epigraph for my biography of Stoppard a line from Arcadia: “It's wanting to know that makes us matter, otherwise we're going out the way we came in.” So I think that's right at the heart of Stoppard's work, and it's right at the heart of any biographical work, whether or not it's mine or someone else's. If you can't know, in the sense of knowing the person, knowing what the person is like, and also knowing as much as possible about them from different kinds of sources, then you might as well give up.You can't do it through impressions. You've got to do it through knowledge. Of course, a certain amount of intuition may also come into play, though I'm not the kind of biographer that feels you can make things up. Working on a living person, this is the only time I've done that.It was, of course, a very different thing from working on a safely dead author. And I knew Penelope Fitzgerald a little bit, but I had no idea I was going to write her biography when I had conversations with her and she wouldn't have told me anything anyway. She was so wicked and evasive. But it was a set up thing; he asked me to do it. And we had a proper contract and we worked together over several years, during which time he became a friend, which was a wonderful piece of luck for me.I was doing four things, really. One was reading all the material that he produced, everything, and getting to know it as well as I could. And that's obviously the basic task. One was talking to him and listening to him talk about his life. And he was very generous with those interviews. I'm sure there were things he didn't tell me, but that's fine. One was talking to other people about him, which is a very interesting process. And with someone like him who knew everyone in the literary, theatrical, cultural world, you have to draw a halt at some point. You can't talk to a thousand people, or I'd have still been doing it, so you talk to particularly fellow playwrights, directors, actors who've worked with him often, as well as family and friends. And then you start pitting the versions against each other and seeing what stands up and what keeps being said.Repetition's very important in that process because when several people say the same thing to you, then you know that's right. And that quest also involves some actual footsteps, as Richard Holmes would say. Footsteps. Traveling to places he'd lived in and going to Darjeeling where he had been to school before he came to England, that kind of travel.And then the fourth, and to me, in a way, almost the most exciting, was the opportunity to watch him at work in rehearsal. So with the director's permissions, I was allowed to sit in on two or three processes like that, the 50th anniversary production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the Old Vic with David Lavoie. And Patrick Marber's wonderful production of Leopoldstadt and Nick Hytner's production of The Hard Problem at the National. So I was able to witness the very interesting negotiations going on between Tom and the director and the cast.And also the extraordinary fact that even with a play like Rosencrantz, which is on every school syllabus and has been for 50—however many years—he was still changing things in rehearsal. I can't get over that. And in his view, as he often said, theater is an event and not a text, and so one could see that actual process of things changing before one's very eyes, and that for a biographer, it's a pretty amazing privilege.Oliver: How much of the plays were written during rehearsal do you think?Lee: Oh, 99% of the plays were written with much labor, much precision, much correction alone at his desk. The text is there, the text is written, and everything changes when you go into the rehearsal room because you suddenly find that there isn't enough time with that speech for the person to get from the bed to the door. It's physics; you have to put another line in so that someone can make an entrance or an exit, that kind of thing.Or the actors will say quite often, because they were a bit in awe—by the time he became well known—the actors initially would be a bit in awe of the braininess and the brilliance. And quite often the actors will be saying, “I'm sorry, I don't understand. I don't understand this.” You'd often get, “I don't really understand.”And then he would never be dismissive. He would either say, “No, I think you've got to make it work.” I'm putting words into his mouth here. Or he would say, “Okay, let's put another sentence or something like that.”Oliver: Between what he wrote at his desk and the book that's available for purchase now, how much changed? Is it 10%, 50? You know what I mean?Lee: Yes. You should be talking to his editor at Faber, Dinah Wood. So Faber would print a relatively small number for the first edition before the rehearsal process and the final production. And then they would do a second edition, which would have some changes in it. So 2%. Okay. But crucial sometimes.Oliver: No, sure. Very important.Lee: And also some plays like Jumpers went through different additions with different endings, different solutions to plot problems. Travesties, he had a lot of trouble with the Lenins in Travesties because it's the play in which you've got Joyce and you've got Tristan Tzara and you've got the Lenins, and they're all these real people and he makes him talk.But he was a little bit nervous about the Lenin. So what he gave him to say were things that they had really said, that Lenin had really said. As opposed to the Tzara-Joyce stuff, which is all wonderfully made up. The bloody Lenins became a bit of a problem for him. And so that gets changed in later editions you'll find.Oliver: How closely do you think The Real Thing is based on Present Laughter by Noël Coward?Lee: Oh, I think there's a little bit of Coward in there. Yes, sure. I think he liked Coward, he liked Wilde, obviously. He likes brilliant, witty, playful entertainers. He wants to be an entertainer. But I think The Real Thing, he was proud of the fact that The Real Thing was one of the few examples of his plays at that time, which weren't based on something else. They weren't based on Hamlet. They weren't based on The Importance of Being Earnest. It's not based on a real person like Housman. I think The Real Thing came out of himself much more than out of literary models.Oliver: You don't think that Henry is a bit like the actor character in Present Laughter and it's all set in his flat and the couples moving around and the slight element of farce?The cricket bat speech is quite similar to when Gary Essendine—do you remember that very funny young man comes up on the train from Epping or somewhere and lectures him about the social value of art. And Gary Essendine says, “Get a job in a theater rep and write 20 plays. And if you can get one of them put on in a pub, you'll be damn lucky.” It's like a model for him, a loose model.Lee: Yes. Henry, I think you should write an article comparing these two plays.Oliver: Okay. Very good. What does Stoppardian mean?Lee: It means witty. It means brilliant with words. It means fizzing with verbal energy. It means intellectually dazzling. The word dazzling is the one that tends to get used. My own version of Stoppardian is a little bit different from, as it were, those standard received and perfectly acceptable accounts of Stoppardian.My own sense of Stoppardian has more to do with grief and mortality and a sense of not belonging and of puzzlement and bewilderment, within all that I said before, within the dazzling, playful astonishing zest and brio of language and the precision about language.Oliver: Because it's a funny word. It's hard to include Leopoldstadt under the typical use of Stoppardian, because it's an untypical Stoppard.Lee: One of the things about Leopoldstadt that I think is—let's get rid of that trope about Stoppardian—characteristic of him is the remarkable way it deals with time. Here's a play like Arcadia, all set in the same place, all set in the same room, in the same house, and it goes from a big hustling room, late 19th-century family play, just like the beginning of The Coast of Utopia, where you begin with a big family in Russia and then it moves through the '20s and then into the terrible appalling period of the Anschluss and the Holocaust.And then it ends up after the war with an empty room. This room, is like a different kind of theater, an empty room. Three characters, none of whom you know very well, speaking in three different kinds of English, reaching across vast spaces of incomprehension, and you've had these jumps through time.And then at the very end, the original family, all of whom have been destroyed, the original family reappears on the stage. I'm sorry to tell this for anyone who hasn't seen Leopoldstadt. Because when it happens on the stage, it's an absolutely astonishing moment. As if the time has gone round and as if the play, which I think it was for him, was an act of restitution to all those people.Oliver: How often did he use his charm to get his way with actors?Lee: A lot. And not just actors. People he worked with, film people, friends, companions. Charm is such an interesting thing, isn't it? Because we shouldn't deviate, but there's always a slightly sinister aspect to the word charm as in, a magic charm. And one tends to be a bit suspicious of charm. And he knew he had charm and he was physically very magnetic and good looking and very funny and very attentive to people.But I think the charm, in his case, he did use it to get the right results, and he did use it, as he would say, “to look after my plays.” He was always, “I want to look after my plays.” And that's why he went back to rehearsal when there were revivals and so on. But he wasn't always charming. Patrick Marber, who's a friend of his and who directed Leopoldstadt, is very good on how irritable Stoppard could be sometimes in rehearsal. And I've heard that from other directors too—Jack O'Brien, who did the American productions of things like The Invention of Love.If Stoppard felt it wasn't right, he could get quite cross. So this wasn't a sort of oleaginous character at all. It's not smooth, it's not a smooth charm at all. But yes, he knew his power and he used it, and I think in a good way. I think he was a benign character actually. And one of the things that was very fascinating to me, not only when he died and there was this great outpouring of tributes, very heartfelt tributes, I thought. But also when I was working on the biography, I was going around the world trying to find people to say bad things about him, because what I didn't want to do was write a hagiography. You don't want to do that; there would be no point. And it was genuinely quite hard.And I don't know the theater world; it's not my world. I got to know it a little bit then. But I have never necessarily thought of the theater world as being utterly loving and generous about everybody else. I'm sure there are lots of rivalries and spitefulness, as there is in academic life, all the rest of it. But it was very hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about him, even people who'd come up against the steeliness that there is in him.I had an interview with Steven Spielberg about him, with whom he worked a lot, and with whom he did Empire of the Sun. And I would ask my interviewees if they could come up with two or three adjectives or an adjective that would sum him up, that would sum Stoppard up to them. And when I asked Spielberg this question, he had a little think and then he said, intransigent. I thought, great. He must be the only person who ever stood up to him.Oliver: What was his best film script? Did he write a really great film.Lee: That one. I think partly the novel, I don't know if you know the Ballard novel, the Empire of the Sun, it's a marvelous novel. And Ballard was just a magical and amazing writer, a great hero of mine. But I think what Stoppard did with that was really clever and brilliant.I know people like Brazil, the Terry Gilliam sort of surrealist way. And there's some interesting early work. Most of his film work was not one script; it was little bits that he helped with. So there's famously the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, he did most of the dialogue for Harrison Ford.But there are others like the One Hundred and One Dalmatians, where I think there's one line, anonymously Stoppardian in there. One of the things about the obituaries that slightly narked me was that there, I felt there was a bit too much about the films. Truly, I don't think the film work was—he wanted it to be right and he wanted to get it right—but it wasn't as close to his heart as the theater work. And indeed the work for radio, which I thought was generally underwritten about when he died. There was some terrific work there.Oliver: Yes. And there aren't that many canonical writers who've been great on the radio.Lee: Absolutely. He did everything. He did film, he did radio. He wrote some opera librettos. He really did everything. And on top of that, there was the great work for the public good, which I think is a very important part of his legacy, his history.Oliver: How much crossover influence is there between the different bits of his career? Does the screenwriting influence the theater writing and the radio and so on? Or is he just compartmentalized and able to do a lot of different things?Lee: That's such an interesting question. I don't think I've thought about it enough. I think there are very cinematic aspects to some of the plays, like Night and Day, for instance, the play about journalism. That could easily have been a film.And perhaps Hapgood as well, although it could be a kind of John le Carré type film thriller, though it's such a set of complicated interlocking boxes that I don't know that it would work as a film. It's not one of my favorite players, I must say. I struggle a little bit with Hapgood. But, yes, I'm sure that they fed into each other. Because he was so busy, he was often doing several things at once. So he was keeping things in boxes and opening the lid of that box. But mentally things must have overlapped, I'm sure.Oliver: He once joked that rather than having read Wittgenstein from cover to cover, he had only read the covers. How true is that? Because I know some people who would say he's very clever in everything, but he's not as clever as he looks. It's obviously not true that he only read the covers.Lee: I think there was a phase, wasn't there, after the early plays when people felt that he was—it's that English phrase, isn't it—too clever by half. Which you would never hear anyone in France saying of someone that they were too clever by half. So he was this kind of jazzy intellectual who put all his ideas out there, and he was this sort of self-educated savant who hadn't been to Oxford.There was quite a lot of that about in the earlier years, I think. And a sense that he was getting away with it, to which I would countermand with the story of the writing of The Invention of Love. So what attracted him to the figure of Housman initially was not the painful, suppressed homosexual love story, but the fact that here was this person who was divided into a very pernickety, savagely critical classical editor of Latin and a romantic lyric poet. In order to work out how to turn this into a play, he probably spent about six years taking Latin lessons, reading everything he could read on the history of classical literature. Obviously reading about Housman, engaging in conversation with classical scholars about Housman's, finer points of editorial precision about certain phrases. And what he used from that was the tip of the iceberg. But the iceberg was real.He really did that work and he often used to say that it was his favorite play because he'd so much enjoyed the work that went into it. I think he took what he needed from someone like Wittgenstein. I know you don't like The Coast of Utopia very much, but if you read his background to Coast of Utopia, what went into it, and if you compare what's in the plays, those three plays, with what's in the writing about those revolutionaries, he read everything. He may have magpied it, but he's certainly knows what he's talking about. So I defend him a bit against that, I think.Oliver: Good, good. Did you see the recent production at the Hamstead Theatre of The Invention of Love?Lee: I did, yes.Oliver: What did you think?Lee: I liked it. I thought it was rather beautifully done. I liked those boats rowing around that clicked together. I thought Simon Russell Beale was extremely good, particularly very moving. And very good in Housman's vindictiveness as a critic. He is not a nice person in that sense. And his scornfulness about the women students in his class, that kind of thing. And so there was a wonderful vitriol and scorn in Russell Beale's performance.I think when you see it now, some of the Oxford context is a little bit clunky, those scenes with Jowett and Pater and so on, it's like a bit of a caricature of the context of cultural life at the time, intellectual life at the time. But I think that the trope of the old and the young Housman meeting each other and talking to each other, which I still think is very moving. I thought it worked tremendously well.Oliver: What are Tom Stoppard's poems like?Lee: You see them in Indian Ink where he invents a poet, Flora Crewe, who is a poet who was died young, turn of the century, bold feminist associated with Bloomsbury and gets picked up much later as a kind of Sylvia Plath-type, HD type heroine. And when you look at Stoppard's manuscripts in the Harry Ransom Center in the University of Austin, in Texas, there is more ink spent on writing and rewriting those poems of Flora Crewe than anything else I saw in the manuscript. He wrote them and rewrote them.Early on he wrote some Elliot—they're very like Elliot—little poems for himself. I think there are probably quite a lot of love poems out there, which I never saw because they belong to the people for whom he wrote them. So I wouldn't know about those.Oliver: How consistently did Stoppard hold to a kind of liberal individualism in his politics?Lee: He was accused of being very right wing in the 1980s really, 1970s, 1980s, when the preponderant tendency for British drama was radicalism, Royal Court, left wing, all of that. And Stoppard seemed an outlier then, because he approved of Thatcher. He was a friend of Thatcher. He didn't like the print union. It was particularly about newspapers because he'd been a newspaper man in his youth. That was his alternative university education, working in Bristol on the newspapers. He had a romance heroic feeling about the value of the journalist to uphold democracy, and he hated the pressure of the print unions to what he thought at the time was stifling that.He changed his mind. I think a lot about that. He had been very idealistic and in love with English liberal values. And I think towards the end of his life he felt that those were being eroded. He voted lots of different ways. He voted conservative, voted green. He voted lib dem. I don't if he ever voted Labour.Oliver: But even though his personal politics shifted and the way he voted shifted, there is something quite continuous from the early plays through to Rock ‘n' Roll. Is there a sort of basic foundation that doesn't change, even though the response to events and the idea about the times changes?Lee: Yes, I think that's right, and I think it can be summed up in what Henry says in The Real Thing about politics, which is a version of what's often said in his plays, which is public postures have the configuration of private derangement. So that there's a deep suspicion of political rhetoric, especially when it tends towards the final solution type, the utopian type, the sense that individual lives can be sacrificed in the interest of an ultimate rationalized greater good.And then, he's worked in the '70s for the victims of Soviet communism. His work alongside in support of Havel and Charter 77. And he wrote on those themes such as Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and Professional Foul. Those are absolutely at the heart of what he felt. And they come back again when he's very modest about this and kept it quiet. But he did an enormous amount of work for the Belarus exile, Belarus Free Theater collective, people in support of those trying to work against the regime in Belarus.And then the profound, heartfelt, intense feeling of horror about what happened to people in Leopoldstadt. That's all part of the same thing. I think he's a believer in individual freedom and in democracy and has a suspicion of political rhetoric.Oliver: How much were some of his great parts written for specific actors? Because I sometimes have a feeling when I watch one of his plays now, if I'd been here when Felicity Kendal was doing this, I would be getting the whole thing, but I'm getting most of it.Lee: I'm sure that's right. And he built up a team around him: Peter Wood, the director and John Wood who's such an extraordinary Henry Carr in in in Travesties. And Michael Hordern as George the philosopher in Jumpers. And he wrote a lot for Kendal, in the process of becoming life companions.But he'd obviously been writing and thinking of her very much, for instance, in Arcadia. And also I think very much, it's very touching now to see the production of Indian Ink that's running at Hampstead Theatre in which Felicity Kendal is playing the older woman, the surviving older sister of the poet Flora Crewe, where of course the part of Flora Crewe was written for her. And there's something very touching about seeing that now. And, in fact, the first night of that production was the day of Stoppard's funeral. And Kendal couldn't be at the funeral, of course, because she was in the first night of his play. That's a very touching thing.Oliver: Why did he think the revivals came too soon?Lee: I don't really know the answer to that. I think he thought a play had to hook up a lot of oxygen and attract a lot of attention. If you were lucky while it was on, people would remember the casting and the direction of that version of it, and it would have a kind of memory. You had to be there.But people who were there would remember it and talk about it. And if you had another production very soon after that, then maybe it would diminish or take away that effect. I think he had a sort of loyalty to first productions often. What do you think about that? I'm not quite sure of the answer to that.Oliver: I don't know. To me it seems to conflict a bit with his idea that it's a living thing and he's always rewriting it in the rehearsal room. But I think probably what you say is right, and he will have got it right in a certain way through all that rehearsing. You then need to wait for a new generation of people to make it fresh again, if you like.Lee: Or not a generation even, but give it five years.Oliver: Everyone new and this theater's working differently now. We can rework it in our own way. Can we have a few questions about your broader career before we finish?Lee: Depends what they are.Oliver: Your former colleague John Carey died at a similar time to Stoppard. What do you think was his best work?Lee: John Carey's best work? Oh. I thought the biography of Golding was pretty good. And I thought he wrote a very good book on Thackery. And I thought his work on Milton was good. I wasn't so keen on The Intellectuals and the Masses. He and I used to have vociferous arguments about that because he had cast Virginia Woolf with all the modernist fascists, as it were. He'd put her in a pile with Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound and so on. And actually, Virginia Woolf was a socialist feminist. And this didn't seem to have struck him because he was so keen to expose her frightful snobbery, which is what people in England reading Woolf, especially middle class blokes, were horrified by.And she is a snob, there's no doubt about it. But she knew that and she lacerated herself for it too. And I think he ignored all the other aspects of her. So I was angry about that. But he was the kind of person you could have a really good argument with. That was one of the really great things about John.Oliver: He seems to be someone else who was amenable and charming, but also very steely.Lee: Yes, I think he probably was I think he probably was. You can see that in his memoir, I think.Oliver: What was Carmen Callil like?Lee: Oh. She was a very important person in my life. It was she who got me involved in writing pieces for Virago. And it was she who asked me to write the life of Virginia Woolf for Chatto. And she was an enormous, inspiring encourager as she was to very many people. And I loved her.But I was also, as many people were, quite daunted by her. She was temperamental, she was angry. She was passionate. She was often quite difficult. Not a word I like to use about women because there's that trope of difficult women, but she could be. And she lost her temper in a very un-English way, which was quite a sight to behold. But I think of her as one of the most creative and influential publishers of the 20th century.Oliver: Will there be a biography of her?Lee: I don't know. Yes, it's a really interesting question, and I've been asking her executors whether they have any thoughts about that. Somebody said to me, oh, who wants a biography of a publisher? But, actually, publishers are really important people often, so I hope there would be. Yes. And it would need to be someone who understood the politics of feminism and who understood about coming from Australia and who understood about the Catholic background and who understood about her passion for France. And there are a whole lot of aspects to that life. It's a rich and complex life. Yes, I hope there will be someday.Oliver: Her papers are sitting there in the British Library.Lee: They are. And in fact—you kindly mentioned this to start with—I've just finished a biography of the art historian and novelist, Anita Brookner, who won the Booker prize in 1984 for a novel called Hotel du Lac.And Carmen and Anita were great buddies, surprisingly actually, because they were very different kinds of characters. And the year before she died, Carmen, who knew I was working on Anita, showed me all her diary entries and all the letters she'd kept from Anita. And that's the kind of generous person that she was.That material is now sitting in the British Library, along with huge reams of correspondence between Carmen and many other people. And it's an exciting archive.Oliver: She seems to have had a capacity to be friends with almost anyone.Lee: Yes, I think there were people she would not have wanted to be friends with. She was very disapproving of a lot of political figures and particularly right-wing figures, and there were people she would've simply spat at if she was in the room with them. But, yes, she an enormous range of friends, and she was, as I said, she was fantastically encouraging to younger women writers.And, also, another aspect of Carmen's life, which I greatly admired and was fascinated by: In Virago she would often be resuscitating the careers of elderly women writers who had been forgotten or neglected, including Antonia White and including Rosamund Lehmann. And part of Carmen's job at Virago, as she felt, was not just to republish these people, some of whom hadn't had a book published for decades, but also to look after them. And they were all quite elderly and often quite eccentric and often quite needy. And Carmen would be there, bringing them out and looking after them and going around to see them. And really marvelous, I think.Oliver: Yes, it is. Tell me about Brian Moore.Lee: Breean, as he called himself.Oliver: Oh, I'm sorry.Lee: No, it's all right. I think Brian became a friend because in the 1980s I had a book program on Channel 4, which was called Book Four. It had a very small audience, but had a wonderful time over several years interviewing lots and lots of writers who had new books out. We didn't have a budget; it was a table and two chairs and not the kind of book program you see on the television anymore. And I got to know Brian through that and through reviewing him a bit and doing interviews with him, and my husband and I would go out and visit him and his wife Jean.And I loved the work. I thought the work was such a brilliant mixture of popular cultural forms, like the thriller and historical novel and so on. And fascinating ideas about authority and religion and how to be free, how to break free of the bonds of what he'd grown up with in Ireland, in Northern Ireland, the bombs of religious autocracy, as it were. And very surreal in some ways as well. And he was also a very charming, funny, gregarious person who could be quite wicked about other writers.And, he was a wonderfully wicked and funny companion. What breaks my heart about Brian Moore is that while he was alive, he was writing a novel maybe every other year or every three years, and people would review them and they were talked about, and I don't think they were on academic syllabuses but they were really popular. And when he died and there were no more books, it just went. You can think of other writers like that who were tremendously well known in their time. And then when there weren't any more books, just went away. You ask people, now you go out and ask people, say, “What about The Temptation of Eileen Hughes or The Doctor's Wife or Black Robe? And they'll go, “Sorry?”Oliver: If anyone listening to this wants to try one of his novels, where do you say they should start?Lee: I think I would start with The Doctor's Wife and The Temptation of Eileen Hughes. And then if one liked those, one would get a taste for him. But there's plenty to choose from.Oliver: What about Catholics?Lee: Yes. Catholics is a wonderful book. Yes. Wonderful book. Bit like Muriel Spark's The Abbess of Crewe, I think.Oliver: How important is religion to Penelope Fitzgerald's work?Lee: She would say that she felt guilty about not having put her religious beliefs more explicitly into her fiction. I'm very glad that she didn't because I think it is deeply important and she believes in miracles and saints and angels and manifestations and providence, but she doesn't spell it out.And so when at the end of The Gate of Angels, for instance, there is a kind of miracle on the last page but it's much better not to have it spelt out as a miracle, in my view. And in The Blue Flower, which is not my favorite of her books, but it's the book of the greatest genius possibly. And I think she was a genius. There is a deep interest in Novalis's romantic philosophical ideas about a spiritual life, beyond the physical life, no more doctrinally than that. And she, of course, believes in that. I think she believed, in an almost Platonic way, that this life was a kind of cave of shadows and that there was something beyond that. And there are some very mysterious moments in her books, which, if they had been explained as religious experiences, I think would've been much less forceful and much less intense.Oliver: What is your favorite of her books?Lee: Oh, The Beginning of Spring. The Beginning of Spring is set in Moscow just before the revolution. And its concerns an Englishman who runs a print and publishing works. And it's based quite a lot on some factual narratives about people in Moscow at the time. And it's about the feeling of that place and that time, but it's also about being in love with two people at the same time.And, yes, and it's about cultural clashes and cultural misunderstanding, and it is an astonishingly evocative book. And when asked about this book, interviewers would say to Penelope, oh, she must have lived in Moscow for ages to know so much about it. And sometimes she would say, “Yes, I lived there for years.” And sometimes she would say, “No, I've never been there in my life.” And the fact was she'd had a week's book tour in Moscow with her daughter. And that was the only time she ever went to Russia, but she read. So it was a wonderful example of how she would be so wicked; she would lie.Oliver: Yes.Lee: Because she couldn't be bothered to tell the truth.Oliver: But wasn't she poking fun at their silly questions?Lee: Yes. It's not such a silly question. I would've asked her that question. It is an astonishing evocation of a place.Oliver: No, I would've asked it too, but I do feel like she had this sense of it's silly to be asked questions at all. It's silly to be interviewed.Lee: I interviewed her about three times—and it was fascinating. And she would deflect. She would deflect, deflect. When you asked her about her own work, she would deflect onto someone else's work or she would tell you a story. But she also got quite irritable.So for instance, there's a poltergeist in a novel called The Bookshop. And the poltergeist is a very frightening apparition and very strong chapter in the book. And I said to her in interview, “Look, lots of people think this is just superstition. There aren't poltergeists.” And she looked at me very crossly and said they just haven't been there. They don't know what they're talking about. Absolutely factual and matter of fact about the reality of a poltergeist.Oliver: What makes Virginia Woolf's literary criticism so good?Lee: Oh, I think it's a kind of empathy actually. That she has an extraordinary ability to try and inhabit the person that she's writing about. So she doesn't write from the point of view of, as it were, a dry, historical appreciation.She's got the facts and she's read the books, but she's trying to intimately evoke what it felt like to be that writer. I don't mean by dressing it up with personal anecdotes, but just she has an extraordinary way of describing what that person's writing is like, often in images by using images and metaphors, which makes you feel you are inside the story somehow.And she loves anecdotes. She's very good at telling anecdotes, I think. And also she's not soft, but she's not harshly judgmental. I think she will try and get the juice out of anything she's writing about. Most of these literary criticism pieces were written for money and against the clock and whilst doing other things.So if you read her on Dorothy Wordsworth or Mary Wollstonecraft or Henry James, there's a wonderful sense of, you feel your knowledge has been expanded. Knowledge in the sense of knowing the person; I don't mean in the sense of hard facts.Oliver: Sure. You've finished your Anita Brookner biography and that's coming this year.Lee: September the 10th this year, here and in the States.Oliver: What will you do next?Lee: Yes. That's a very good question, though a little soon, I feel.Oliver: Is there someone whose life you always wanted to write, but didn't?Lee: No. No, there isn't. Not at the moment. Who knows?Oliver: You are open to it. You are open.Lee: Who knows what will come up.Oliver: Yes. Hermione Lee, this was a real pleasure. Thank you very much.Lee: Thank you very much. It was a treat. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

Let's take a look at SVS' upcoming season--Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Much Ado About Nothing through the lens of Reddit's AITA!Special Guest actor: James Lucas

Plus an interview with Jo McIver Lee and Em Perez from Unleashed Theater about their Hallmark-movie-meets-slasher-flick play opening this weekend. In this episode of the OnStage Colorado Podcast, hosts Alex Miller and Toni Tresca follow up on last week's show featuring holiday shows around the state to call out some of the non-holiday offerings available. From the military courtroom drama A Few Good Men at Boulder's Upstart Crow Theatre to Theatreworks' production of The Importance of Being Earnest in Colorado Springs, there are more than a few un-tinseled shows to see this month.Along with a bit of theatre news touching on Colorado Gives Day and Giving Tuesday, we also get into John Moore's annual True West Awards — which he says are the last ever this year. Later in the episode, Alex interviews Em Perez and Jo McIver Lee from Unleashed Theatre about their upcoming show Christmas Movie, The Play, The Beginning - described as “Hallmark Christmas meets 80s slasher.”

In this episode of the OnStage Colorado Podcast, hosts Alex Miller and Toni Tresca follow up on last week's show featuring holiday shows around the state to call out some of the non-holiday offerings available. From the military courtroom drama A Few Good Men at Boulder's Upstart Crow Theatre to Theatreworks' production of The Importance of Being Earnest in Colorado Springs, there are more than a few un-tinseled shows to see this month.Along with a bit of theatre news touching on Colorado Gives Day and Giving Tuesday, we also get into John Moore's annual True West Awards — which he says are the last ever this year. Later in the episode, Alex interviews Em Perez and Jo McIver Lee from Unleashed Theatre about their upcoming show Christmas Movie, The Play, The Beginning - described as “Hallmark Christmas meets 80s slasher.”

Clive Anderson is joined by a giggle of comics or should that be a brace of jokers in the Loose Ends studio this week. Fawlty Towers creator John Cleese recalls being told his nascent sitcom - 50 years old this year - would fail if they didn't "get it out of the hotel more". Sue Perkins describes the urge to get out on a stand up tour again after a decade presenting shows from Great British Bake Off to Just a Minute, her show is called The Eternal Shame of Sue Perkins - what could be so embarrassing? Judi Love is on our screens practically daily - on ITV's Loose Women or shows from Taskmaster to The Wheel but she too is drawn to the stage - what gives? Meanwhile Hugh Dennis is not on tour, but he's on stage, as Rev Chasuble in the National Theatre's production of The Importance of Being Earnest - he may not be planning to go all churchy but he does feel right at home in clerical garb. With music from Editors front man Tom Smith with a track from his forthcoming album There Is Nothing In The Dark That Isn't There In The Light and from Natalie Duncan Trio with her new single Breakaway before her London Jazz Festival gig.Produced by Olive Clancy

It's episode 221 and time for us to talk about Epic & High Fantasy! We talk about maps, magic, monsters, whether Pokémon counts as epic fantasy, and more! You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through Apple Podcasts or your favourite podcast delivery system. In this episode Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray

Oscar Wilde remains one of the greatest writers in the modern era. A genius with the pen he was born in Dublin, Ireland on October 16 1854 an died on November 30th 1900 in Paris, France. He took his artistic talents from his mother Jane Francesca Elgee, a poet and a journalist.He published his fairy tales for his two sons in 1888. His only novel, the Picture of Dorian Grey was published in 1891 to a very negative response owing mostly to the depiction of homoeroticism. The dialogue in this book is some of the best dialogue I have ever had the pleasure of reading. His truest talent lay in the writing of his plays, Lady Windermere's Fan in 1892, A Woman of No Importance in 1893, An Ideal Husband in 1895 and the Importance of Being Earnest, also in 1895.Losing a case he had brought for libel against the Marquis of Queensbury for having accused him of homosexuality, he was arrested and tried for gross indecency and was sentenced to 2 years of hard labour. He wrote De Profundis while in prison.When released in 1897 he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol for his concerns about prison conditions. He spent the rest of his life wandering around Europe, penniless, staying with friends. He died in a cheap hotel in Paris of cerebral meningitis.I welcome opinions of every kind so please come and find me on social media at:Instagram: TwoandaMicTwitter: TwoandaMic1TikTok: Twoandamic2Should I really have to ask?

This week on the LU Moment, we sit down with LU alumna, Emily Buesing, to learn more about her journey as a working artist, and to talk about LU Department of Theatre & Dance's upcoming production of “The Importance of Being Earnest." For the full transcription of this episode, visit https://lamaru.us/lumomenttranscript.For updates on the latest news and events at Lamar University, visit lamar.edu/news.

At long last...! So, one thing after another happened in our lives this summer, and the hiatus lasted longer than we anticipated or intended. But! We are back for another handful of episodes to round out the Season, kicking off today with a readthrough of Lords of Summer. This volume for Changeling: the Lost's first edition explored the concept of freeholds and provided a wealth of information for the four main Courts, giving us a much-needed look at the politics and society of the fae. We also get some fascinating new Entitlements for the Lost who needs some added purpose in their life. As with the other books in the game's first wave, this one is dense with material, and a lot of our discussion has been cut or condensed to fit into the episode. But equally, we hope as always that it's informative and sheds some light on the lore of the 'lings. You can snag a copy of the volume at https://www.storytellersvault.com/en/product/56375?affiliate_id=3063731, and note that it's currently 40% off for the Month of Darkness sale on the Storytellers' Vault. (Maybe fill out your collection with some other discounted books while you're at it, especially the homebrew Changeling stuff created by the community...!) Apart from that, if you'd like to reach out and bother us politely, feel free to do so via the following: Discord: https://discord.me/ctp Email: podcast@changelingthepodcast.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100082973960699 Mastodon: https://dice.camp/@ChangelingPod Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/changelingthepodcast YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ChangelingThePodcast your hosts Pooka G (any pronoun/they) qualified for an Autumn Court Scrivener position thanks to some fiercely effective bullet journaling. Amelia Fetch (she/her) would rather the Winter Court specialized in the Contracts of the Blanket-Wrapped Hot Chocolate Book Club. Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can't get into it do that. —Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Today Scotland Yard chief Sir Mark Rowley has apologised after serving officers called for immigrants to be shot, revelled in the use of force and were dismissive of rape claims in an undercover BBC documentary, which was aired on Wednesday night. Sir Mark Rowley said the behaviour of some at Charing Cross Police exposed by Panorama is “reprehensible and completely unacceptable” - but he denied that the Met Police is institutionally racist. Dr Aaron Winter, a senior lecturer in sociology at Lancaster University, responds to the news. And in part two, The Standard's Theatre Critic and Host of The London Theatre Review podcast, Nick Curtis, joins us to review a new rendition of Oscar Wilde's famous play The Importance of Being Earnest, from director Max Webster, which is showing at London's Noel Coward Theatre. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I denne episoden av Agendaen anbefaler Iben teaterstykket The Importance of Being Earnest. Stykket er skrevet av Oscar Wilde, og har nylig vært en del av prosjektet "National Theater Live", som betyr at teaterstykker blir filmet og vist på kino eller lagt ut for streaming. All lyd fra stykket er hentet fra National Theater Live sin youtube kanal. 

Is it illegal to take a photo of an empty chair in Malta? Welcome back to the Chris Moyles Show on Radio X Podcast.As it's the 10 year anniversary of Radio X, we had one final £10,000 to give away. Plus, we announced Radio X is Ten Live! Circa Waves, Hard-Fi, and Jake Bugg are all going to be there in Manchester this November, as well as headliners Blossoms who joined the team to chat about their journey with Radio X.We spoke to Sir Stephen Fry about his play ‘The Importance of Being Earnest' which is now showing in London's West End. Etiquette expert William Hanson waltzed in for a huge podcast announcement and more importantly, try something he's never got his mouth around before. Jason Byrne was on the show this week to talk about his love of Bono, and his UK tour of new show ‘Head In The Clouds'. And the guy who once sat behind a laptop, Richard Osman, popped by to discuss his books being made into films by Steven Spielberg, spelling Piers Brosnan's name incorrectly, and his new book ‘The Impossible Fortune' that made Chris cry. That's all for this week but keep an ear out for these crackers:A certain jam eater's birthday Dom's nudey cruiseOne of our most excited winners of tickets ever! Enjoy!The Chris Moyles Show on Radio XWeekdays 6:30am - 10am

Send us a textThe subject of today's podcast, Oscar Wilde is extremely important because of his efforts in making wit an art form. His plays — such as The Importance of Being Earnest — are still laugh-out-loud funny more than a century later, which almost no other Victorian writer can claim. He exposed the hypocrisy and absurdity of his society with dazzling one-liners that still feel sharp in our own age of image-making and social performance.But beyond the jokes, Wilde's life gives him lasting weight. He lived boldly, at enormous personal risk, in an era when his sexuality was criminalized. His downfall — from London celebrity to prison — makes his art feel all the more courageous.Support the showThank you for experiencing Celebrate Creativity.

Feeder perform tracks from their album, Comfort in Sound, on the day of its deluxe re-release!Stephen Fry chats to us all about starring in The Importance of Being Earnest which begins on Thursday 18th September at London's Noel Coward Theatre!Join Chris and the Class Behind The Glass every weekday morning from 0630am on Virgin Radio, just ask your smart speaker to "Play Virgin Radio!" Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We preview the next Racine Theater Guild production - Oscar Wilde's classic comedy "The Importance of Being Earnest" with Doug Instenes, managing and artistic director of the RTG, who is also the stage director for this production. (It opens this Friday and runs for the next three weekends.)

In this episode of Chronicles, Luca is joined by Harry to discuss The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. They explore the play's satire of Victorian society and the themes of beauty, truth, and triviality.

As the National Theatre's production of The Importance of Being Earnest transfers to the West End with Stephen Fry taking the role of Lady Bracknell, but do older actresses lose out when men are cast in women's roles? Nikolai Foster, Artistic Director of the Leicester Curve Theatre and Nicky Clark, founder of the Acting Your Age Campaign discuss. The bestselling author of Yellowface, R.K. Kuang, discusses her new novel Katabasis.Director Daniels Evans talks about his production of Born With Teeth which sees actors Ncuti Gatwa and Edward Bluemel reimagine the relationship of Marlowe and Shakespeare.And we hear archive of the late actor Terence Stamp, one of the defining cinematic figures of his generation talking about working with Federico Fellini.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Ruth Watts

Donald Trump has stepped up his diplomatic assault on the government of Brazil's left- wing president, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva. He's signed an executive order which brings total tariffs on Brazilian goods to fifty percent. At the same time, the US Treasury has imposed financial sanctions on the senior Brazilian judge overseeing the criminal case for coup plotting against Brazil's former leader, Jair Bolsonaro. We speak to Brazilian ambassador to London, Antonio Patriota.Also, we speak to Yehuda Cohen - the father of an Israeli soldier taken hostage on October 7th -- who tells us he thinks the recognition of a Palestinian state will help pressure his government to get his son home. And the actor Stephen Fry on playing a formidable aristocratic woman in Oscar Wilde's most famous play, the Importance of Being Earnest.(Photo: President Trump and Brazilian then-President Bolsonaro at Mar-a-Lago in 2020. Credit: Getty Images)

Theatre and magic collide as Erik Christopher Peterson kicks off a seven-episode Harry Potter and the Cursed Child cast takeover on the podcast. In this deep-dive conversation, Erik reflects on growing up with a theatre educator dad, trading in his baseball glove for the stage, and eventually making his Broadway debut as Scorpius Malfoy. He shares the inspiration behind some of his original plays (like the hilariously surreal The Tragedy of Clownpheus and EuridIceCream), how Shakespeare continues to influence his work, and the joy of building his version of Scorpius eight shows a week. Erik talks about navigating the illusion-heavy world of Cursed Child, from mastering time turners and flaming trolleys to discovering emotional nuance in the show's father-son themes and the beautifully complex friendship between Scorpius and Albus. He opens up about performance anxiety, self-care, and the unexpected fan art that continues to move him. It's a candid, heartfelt look at what it means to debut on Broadway in one of its most technically complex productions. Erik Christopher Peterson is a writer, director, and actor whose credits include The Importance of Being Earnest, Othello, and several original plays he co-created, such as The Tragedy of Clownpheus and EEuridIceCream. He graduated from Webster University and currently stars as Scorpius Malfoy in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway. This episode is powered by WelcomeToTimesSquare.com, the billboard where you can be a star for a day. Connect with Erik IG: @erik.c.peterson Connect with The Theatre Podcast: Support the podcast on Patreon and watch video versions of the episodes: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon.com/TheTheatrePodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter & Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@theatre_podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook.com/OfficialTheatrePodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TheTheatrePodcast.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Alan's personal Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@alanseales⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Email me at feedback@thetheatrepodcast.com. I want to know what you think. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join us for a laid back chit-chat that meanders like a lazy river. Clay talks about acting and his performance in The Importance of Being Earnest. Michael chats about his weekend trip to Colorado and James shares exciting information about the Plano Senior Center. Plus a review of the Switch 2. All washed down with a patriotic beer. Beer: True American by Turning Point Brewing Co.

FTP Theater Hour: Home, I'm Darling review -- Importance of Being Earnest preview -- Lionheart Hall "Lightswitch" series

On the first-ever double episode of The Catered Quiz, we're joined by Paula Skaggs and Josh Linden, authors of the book Tiny Pep Talks and creators of the game No Wrong Answers. Paula answers questions about Failed Presidential Candidates and Chain Restaurants while Josh answers questions about Minor League Baseball and Medieval History. We also talk about The Towering Inferno, Paula's bachelorette party and Slumdog Millionaire. To purchase No Wrong Answers, visit www.nowronganswersgame.com. Tiny Pep Talks is available to purchase at your favorite bookstore or to borrow from your local library. And if you can't get enough Paula & Josh, listen to their podcast Being Earnest for hours of entertainment.

Journalist and editor Marianka Swain returns to co-host The West End Frame Show!Andrew and Marianka discuss the West End transfer of Stereophonic (Duke of York's Theatre) as well as the latest news about the new Encores season including Billy Porter in La Cage aux Folles, new plays at the King's Head Theatre, Olly Alexander being cast in The Importance of Being Earnest and lots more.Marianka is a London-based journalist and editor, writing culture articles, reviews and general features for the Telegraph newspaper and for London Theatre. This is her sixth time co-hosting The West End Frame Show! Visit Marianka's website: www.mkmswain.comThis podcast is hosted by Andrew Tomlins. @AndrewTomlins32 Thanks for listening!Email: andrew@westendframe.co.ukVisit westendframe.co.uk for more info about our podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we discuss, laugh about, and delight Jane Austen's Emma. We talk about the novel's themes of autonomy and companionship and how these are at odds; we also delve into what we think the book is saying about love, marriage, friendship, and class. We of course giggle and marvel over the book's wonderful characters, and we also get a bit nerdy as we make comparisons to Shakespeare's comedies.Links:Emma and New Comedy [JASNA]The Powers of the Instrument: Or, Jane, Frank, and the Pianoforte [JASNA]Books Mentioned & Shelf DiscoveryA Midsummer Night's Dream by William ShakespeareAs You Like It by William ShakespeareThe Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar WildeThe Luck of the Bodkins by PG WodehouseCleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco MellorsDial A for Aunties by Jesse Q SutantoIf you would like to get additional behind-the-scenes content related to this and all of our episodes, subscribe to our free newsletter.We love to hear from listeners about the books we discuss - you can connect with us on Instagram or by emailing us at thenovelteapod@gmail.com.This episode description contains links to Bookshop.org, a website that supports independent bookstores. If you use these links we may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Darryl Jones joins Caroline to discuss the first collection of Raffles stories. No major plot spoilers until you hear Caroline say we are "entering the spoiler zone", at 10:30. After that, expect full spoilers. A full list of titles in the Penguin series can be found at penguinfirsteditions.com. The next book discussed in this series will be The Four Just Men by Edgar Wallace. Join the Shedunnit Book Club for two extra Shedunnit episodes a month plus access to the monthly reading discussions and community: shedunnitbookclub.com/join. Books mentioned in this episode: — Raffles by E.W. Hornung — The Mysterious Affair At Styles by Agatha Christie — No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase — The Final Problem by Arthur Conan Doyle — The Hound of Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle — The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde — The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle — The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson — The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde — The Black Mask by E.W. Hornung — Fiction and the Reading Public by Q.D. Leavis — King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard Past Shedunnit Green Penguin episodes: — The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (Green Penguin Book Club 1) — The Murder on the Links (Green Penguin Book Club 2) — The Thin Man (Green Penguin Book Club 3) — Mr Fortune, Please (Green Penguin Book Club 4) — The Poisoned Chocolates Case (Green Penguin Book Club 5) — The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Green Penguin Book Club 6) — The Missing Moneylender (Green Penguin Book Club 7) NB: Links to Blackwell's are affiliate links, meaning that the podcast receives a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you). Blackwell's is a UK bookselling chain that ships internationally at no extra charge. To be the first to know about future developments with the podcast, sign up for the newsletter at shedunnitshow.com/newsletter. The podcast is on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as @ShedunnitShow, and you can find it in all major podcast apps. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss the next episode. Click here to do that now in your app of choice. Find a full transcript of this episode at shedunnitshow.com/rafflestranscript Music by Audioblocks and Blue Dot Sessions. See shedunnitshow.com/musiccredits for more details. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Poppy deals with some news: she's pregnant! We're back to talk all about "Second Skeleton."Jenn (@notajenny) and Chels (@chels725) have so many thoughts about this hilarious, heartfelt episode. (We adore you, Ashly Burch!) They talk all about Poppy's fears of being a bad mom, how Ian tries to help, and what they think of Shannon being the person who ultimately gives Poppy the best advice. Jenn and Chels go on a slight tangent about awards shows and wonder why in the world Rob and Charlotte don't yet have acting Emmys for this show.They then talk about Dana meeting her new enemy and Brad getting a surprising storyline.Enjoy!Our recommended media:National Theatre Live: The Importance of Being Earnest (tickets | trailer)Thanks Dad with Ego Nwodim podcastMentioned in the episode:Danny Pudi, Ashly Burch, and Jessie Ennis' appearance on @fter midnight with Taylor Tomlinson.Follow us on Bluesky, Instagram, and Twitter for more fun content. Support the Loveland Therapy Fund for Black Women and Girls, and donate if you can to the ACLU Drag Defense Fund.

Our website - www.perksofbeingabooklover.com. Instagram - @perksofbeingabookloverpod Facebook - Perks of Being a Book Lover. To send us a message go to our website and click the Contact button. You can find Wes Browne at www.wesbrowneauthor.com or on IG at @browne_all_over This week we chat with Wes Browne, a Michigan transplant who has been a Kentucky attorney for over 20 years. When he's not lawyering, he writes crime fiction, and his most recent novel is called They All Fall the Same. In this novel, he picks up with a character who readers met in his first novel, Hillbilly Hustle. While Wes's new book is not a sequel, readers were so intrigued by the character, Burl Spoon, that Wes felt like he could make an entire book around him. Burl is a character you love to hate, but readers also feel his humanity, which always makes for a more interesting bad guy.  We chat with Wes about how his job as a defense attorney has prepared him to write books that make you root for a bad guy, his passion for soft serve ice cream, and why a timeshare ended up giving him a book idea.   And in the second half of the show, we each give you 3 book recommendations on the theme of books about the art world.   Books Mentioned in This Episode: 1- If You Lived Here, You'd Be Here by Now: Why We Traded the Commuting Life for a Little House on the Prairie by Christopher Ingraham 2- The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde 3- They All Fall the Same by Wes Browne   4- Hillbilly Hustle by Wes Browne   5- Asides: Occasional Essays on Dogs, Food, Restaurants, Bars, Hangovers, Jobs, Music, Family Trees, Robbery, Relationships, Being Bought Up Questionably, Et Cetera by George Singleton   6- Blizzard by Marie Vingtras   7- A Five Star Read Recommended by a Fellow Book Lover Amy Borchadt @rn_bookworm - The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal   8- Carrington: A Life by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina   9- The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith   10- Blood Water Paint by Joy McCullough   11- The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose   12- Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet by Stephanie Cowell   13- Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Jourey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How To See by Bianca Bosker   14- All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley     Media mentioned— 1- Come From Away — https://comefromaway.com/   2- Zoltan Kaszas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vSGbslfLQM   3- Justified ( 2010-2015 HULU)   4- Carrington (1995)          

HP Lovecraft wrote one play that never made it to the stage. Here we present it in audio drama form. Featuring Robert Price as RINARTO Richard Wilson as ALFREDO. Andrew Goldfarb as TEOBALDO The Slow Poisoner (aka Andrew Goldfarb) is a one-man surreal rock 'n' roll band based out of San Francisco. He publishes Freaky Magazine. Bill Green as MAURICIO, a Cardinal Sam Orndorff as OLERO Allen Schuler as MARCELLO Eric Roper as GONZAGO, father of HYPATIA. Amanda Wilson as MARGARITA, Daughter of OLERO Laura Sullivan as AMALIA Laura Sullivan is returning to stage acting since high school. She has been in such plays as The Importance of Being Earnest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Doctor Jeckyll, No Place To Hyde. She has written a play, Dragon Attack, she hopes to have produced. Amanda Hardin as BEATRIZ, Young woman of the court. Laura Griffin as CARLOTA Laura Griffin is an Army Veteran who enjoys many varied hobbies, including birding, gardening, singing, playing piano, composing, woodworking, antique furniture restoration, sewing, and historical costuming. She also enjoys homeschooling her innovative and artistic 13-year-old son, Kai. Shelly Turner as DOROTEA. Shelly Turner has performed at Madrigal feasts for many years. She is the acquirer of tomes for the podcast and others. Mary Andrews as ELENA, Young woman of the court Denise Andrews as HYPATIA, daughter to MARCELLO Kimberly Sandage as HECATISSA Kimberly Sandage is a Kentucky artist living in Columbus, Ohio. Written by H.P. Lovecraft Directed by Mark Griffin and Katie Tyson Sound design by Katie Tyson Lute music by Laura Griffin Other sound elements and music from pixabay.com Visit our Tee Spring site to get our logo on anything you could want. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lovecraftpod.creator-spring.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Questions and comments can be directed to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠mark@lovecraftpod.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠david@lovecraftpod.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠richard@lovecraftpod.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. In association with ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.lovecraftpod.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and the Logan County Speculative Fiction Group, with help from the Logan County Public Library.

A new version of Oscar Wilde's iconic play The Importance of Being Earnest is enjoying a sold-out run at the National Theatre. Jen caught up with its stars, Sharon D Clarke, Ronke Adekoluejo and Eliza Scanlen, to chat about the enduring appeal of the play, how they're bringing it to a fresh audience, and accessibility of theatre in the UK. The run is now sold out except for Rush tickets, but you can catch it on NT Live from February 20. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode 090: The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde Host: Douglas Schatz Guest: Max Webster Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing. Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest is arguably the most famous romantic comedy in theatrical history. The play is renowned for its effervescent portrait of aristocratic romance, and its impossibly clever wit, including some of the most quotable lines in dramatic literature. But it is also an anarchic parody of social custom and pretension – a serious statement of aesthetic principles and coded sexual politics. As we record this episode, a joyous new production of the play is running at the National Theatre in London, and I am delighted to talk about Wilde's classic with its acclaimed director, Max Webster.

In a fantastic additional episode, WhatsOnStage's intrepid deputy editor Tom Millward hopped to the National to meet three of the stars of The Importance of Being Earnest. The cast discuss Max Webster's take on the classic, finding the queer underpinnings in Wilde's work and bringing new audiences to the National – as well as working with Ncuti Gatwa. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In a new episode, Sarah and Alex mull on the National Theatre's bold new take on Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest led by Sex Education and Doctor Who star Ncuti Gatwa. This leads them on to a wider discussion about the brilliant success of casting directors in guiding top talent from the stage to the screen – and then back to the stage. Speaking of casting directors, the WhatsOnStage Awards nominees were unveiled this week, with the casting category being one of many chock full of top stage and creative talent. Alex and Sarah reflect on how the awards have changed, and what they say about the UK theatre ecosystem. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by Naomi Alderman and Mark Ravenhill to review a new production of The Importance of Being Earnest at the National Theatre, starring the current Doctor Who Ncuti Gatwa, W1A's Hugh Skinner and Sharon D Clarke. Plus comedy horror Rumours starring Cate Blanchett, and Grand Theft Hamlet – a documentary film which was shot inside the GTA game during the 2021 lockdown. Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Claire Bartleet

Ray Bradbury, BBC Radio 3 | Leviathan 99 | May 4, 1968Waiter Fitzgerald and who tells the poetic prophetic story of the rocket ship and her crew commanded by a blinded captain, crazed like Herman Melville's Captain Ahab, hurtling through space to intercept the terrible white Moby Dick-like comet Leviathan. On the rocket base Crew of the Cetus 7 Technical direction by Harry Catlin Adapted for stereophony and produced by H. B. FORTUIN Robert Eddison is in 'The Importance of Being Earnest at the Hay-market Theatre. London Second broadcast followed by an interlude at 7.40: : : : :My other podcast channels include: MYSTERY x SUSPENSE -- DRAMA X THEATER -- COMEDY x FUNNY HA HA -- VARIETY X ARMED FORCES -- THE COMPLETE ORSON WELLES .Subscribing is free and you'll receive new post notifications. Also, if you have a moment, please give a 4-5 star rating and/or write a 1-2 sentence positive review on your preferred service -- that would help me a lot.Thank you for your support.https://otr.duane.media | Instagram @duane.otr#scifiradio #oldtimeradio #otr #radiotheater #radioclassics #bbcradio #raybradbury #twilightzone #horror #oldtimeradioclassics #classicradio #horrorclassics #xminusone #sciencefiction #duaneotr:::: :

“We can plant a memory garden.” This week we have a show and tell episode on garden songs, exploring the theme of gardens and flowers across Taylor Swift's lyrics. From the haunting imagery in Ivy to the rich symbolism of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in Cowboy Like Me, and the many different flowers in The Great War, we dig (get it?) into how Taylor uses garden and flower metaphors to evoke ideas of romance, loyalty, and loss.    Mentioned in this episode:  E7: S&T-Ecocriticism The Bible  Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence  The Secret Garden by Frances Burnett  The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde  E32: DD-Love Story Gardens of Babylon Photo 1  Gardens of Babylon Photo 2  Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf  Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence  Crimson Clover Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll  In Flanders Fields by John McCrae The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum  The New Look on Apple TV+   ***   Episode Highlights:  [03:56] “ivy” evermore [16:42] “cowboy like me” evermore [28:00] “The Great War” Midnights (3am Edition)   Subscribe to get new episode updates: aptaylorswift.substack.com/subscribe   Follow us on social!  TikTok → tiktok.com/@APTaylorSwift Instagram → instagram.com/APTaylorSwift YouTube → youtube.com/@APTaylorSwift Link Tree →linktr.ee/aptaylorswift Bookshop.org → bookshop.org/shop/apts Libro.fm →  tinyurl.com/aptslibro   This podcast is neither related to nor endorsed by Taylor Swift, her companies, or record labels. All opinions are our own. Intro music produced by Scott Zadig aka Scotty Z.   Affiliate Codes:  Krowned Krystals - krownedkrystals.com use code APTS at checkout for 10% off!  Libro.fm - Looking for an audiobook? Check out our Libro.fm playlist and use code APTS30 for 30% off books found here tinyurl.com/aptslibro

Sharon D Clarke is a triple Olivier award-winning actress currently starring in two separate TV series: My Loverman on BBC One and Ellis on Channel 5. In November she's playing the role of Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest at the Lyttelton Theatre in London. Sharon joins Krupa Padhy to talk about her new roles and what black representation on stage and screen means to her.Mums say that the UK's system for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) is broken. An opinion poll from Opinium commissioned by Woman's Hour for a programme on SEND last month revealed that only half of mothers believe their child with SEND is well supported in school, and those in Scotland are the least likely to feel this way. Krupa takes a look at what is going on behind the scenes with Julie Allan, Professor of Equity and Inclusion at the University of Birmingham; Bev Alderson, National Executive Member of the teaching union NASUWT and Jo Van Herwegen. Professor of Developmental Psychology and Education at University College London.The rap musician Sean ‘Diddy' Combs could face lawsuits from more than 100 accusers for sexual assault, rape and sexual exploitation. He is currently being held in a New York detention centre after being denied bail. What are the accusations against him? And what impact is this having on the alleged victims? BBC News correspondent Chi Chi Izundu joins Krupa to tell us more.Who were the trailblazing black women in nursing and how far back does that history go? The children's black history author Kandace Chimbiri asks that question in her latest book The Story of Britain's Black Nurses. She examines how far back this history goes and its links to Empire and Britain's former colonies.

By the end of 1895 Oscar Wilde's life was in ruins as he sat in Reading Gaol facing public disgrace, bankruptcy and, two years later, exile. Just ten months earlier the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest at St James's Theatre in London had been greeted rapturously by both the audience and critics. In this episode Colin and Clare consider what Wilde was trying do with his comedy, written on the cusp of this dark future. The ‘strange mixture of romance and finance' Wilde observed in the letters of his lover, Alfred Douglas, could equally be applied to Earnest, and the satire of Jane Austen before it, but is it right to think of Wilde's play as satirical? His characters are presented in an ethical vacuum, stripped of any good or bad qualities, but ultimately seem to demonstrate the impossibility of living a purely aesthetic life free from conventional morality.Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4dbjbjGIn other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadingsRead more in the LRB:Colm Tóibín on Wilde's letters: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n08/colm-toibin/love-in-a-dark-timeColm Tóibín the Wilde family: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n23/colm-toibin/the-road-to-reading-gaolFrank Kermode: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n19/frank-kermode/a-little-of-this-honey Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We're celebrating our 250th podcast episode of This Grit and Grace Life with 26 wise quotes from a literary classic: Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Whether you've read the novel or not, there's much to be gleaned from the conversations among its four protagonists, the young March sisters. If you need some encouragement in your relationships and goals or need to be reminded of the qualities of a confident woman, take a few minutes to tune into this episode. Darlene and Julie also share their favorite lessons learned from the This Grit and Grace Life podcast archive. Quote of the episode: “If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking.” James 1:5 Resources Click HERE to download a printable PDF copy of this episode's Little Women quotes! Mentioned Little Women by Louisa May Alcott The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Armadale by Wilkie Collins Henry IV, Part 1 by William Shakespeare Dolly Dialogues by Anthony Hope Eric by Terry Pratchett Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde Be sure to follow us on social media! Facebook Instagram Twitter Pinterest #gritandgracelife

EPISODE 54 - "SPECIAL GUEST: PERI GILPIN TALKS OLD HOLLYWOOD" - 09/23/2024 ** This episode is sponsored brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BENEATH and get on your way to being your best self.” ** We all know her as the hilarious and acerbic radio producer Roz Doyle on the iconic sitcom “Frasier,” and on the reboot currently airing on Paramount Plus. This week, we have a sit-down interview with actress PERI GILPIN. Peri discusses her love of classic films, the films that inspired and influenced her, and the classic film stars who she has had the good-fortune to work with. Tune in to this very special episode.  SHOW NOTES:  Sources: TheStudioTour.com; TCM.com; IMDBPro.com; IBDB.com; Wikipedia.com; Movies Mentioned:  Shell (2024), starring Elizabeth Moss and Kate Hudson; Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1960); Pillow Talk (1959); Move Over Darling (1963); The Thrill of It All (1963); Switch (1991); The Importance of Being Earnest (1952); Tootsie (1982); Bringing Up Baby (1938); The Philadelphia Story (1940); All About Eve (1950); Star Wars (1977); Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969); North By Northwest (1959); The Godfather (1972); The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956); Sense and Sensibility (1995); The Sound of Music (1965) --------------------------------- http://www.airwavemedia.com Please contact sales@advertisecast.com if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We're excited to be back in your podcast feeds to pair highly anticipated fall book releases with beloved backlist favorites. Prepare to overload your TBR pile as we dive into an exciting fall publishing season filled with moody, atmospheric titles. In today's episode, we'll share our carefully curated lists of outstanding upcoming fiction from both renowned authors and indie presses, along with a selection of diverse fiction and nonfiction we think you'll enjoy, all paired with a backlist book to explore while you await your library holds and pre-orders. Before diving into the books, we want to remind our community that Chelsey will be on maternity leave this fall. As a small (very small!) business, this requires significant planning and adjustments. To best manage our schedules while preserving the community we've created, we will take a short break from the main feed while focusing on providing fun, nerdy new content on Patreon at patreon.com/novelpairings.  We aim to return to the main feed in December or January with a special episode featuring the best books of 2024, along with a thrilling spring season. In the meantime, we will continue to offer bonus episodes, discussion-based classes, and book club events through our Patreon community. You can join us at either the $5 or $10 level, depending on your desired level of participation. We are incredibly thankful for your support. Thank you for being with us!    Books Mentioned The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro Frankenstein by Mary Shelley I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith Guide Me Home by Attica Locke  The Headmaster by Tiffany Reisz  Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno Garcia  The Professor by Charlotte Bronte Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout Graveyard Shift by ML Rio  If We Were Villians by ML Rio The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osmond The Wildes by Louis Bayard The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde  The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Jackie & Me by Louis Bayard The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng Heir by Sabaa Tahir  Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon Don't Be a Stranger by Susan Minot Sandwich by Catherine Newman All Fours by Miranda July The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister  Olympus, Texas by Stacey Swann The Starling House by Alix E. Harrow Curdle Creek by Yvonnne Battle-Felton Ours by Philip B. Williams Lone Women by Victor Lavalle The Muse of Maiden Lane by Mimi Matthews The Lily of Ludgate Hill by Mimi Matthews Persuasion by Jane Austen The Wedgford Trials by Courtney Milian The Children of Jocasta by Natalie Haynes  Homefire by Kamila Shamsie Rental House by Weike Wang Chemistry by Weike Wang Joan Is Okay by Weike Wang Goodbye Vitamin by Rachel Kong The Fortnite In September by RC Sheriff   Also Mentioned The English Teacher A Discovery of Witches Fiction Matters Substack Joyce Carol Oates Algonquin Books Anonymous Divorce/Sex Substack Cup of Jo Substack  

Some of the usual suspects are back, minus Ron and Kathleen. The topic is how much research should you do when playing a historical character. Carol reveals her favorite accent of all time, Dave and Brian discuss their upcoming show, "Moonlight & Magnolias", Bob's witty one-liners are in abundance and Brian gives a review on a unique version of "The Importance of Being Earnest" that he saw in Edinburgh, Scotland. Come hither and let the groupies regale you with the topic of the week!

Novelist Louis Bayard's new book The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts, depicts the fateful weekend in 1892 that spawned not only the comedy of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest but the tragic downfall of Oscar's family. Bayard reveals how he walked that tonal line; how he's been in touch with Wilde's still-living grandson; how he combined the historical romance of Courting Mr. Lincoln with the suspense and intrigue of The Pale Blue Eye; how it's easier to depict famous characters through the eyes of their contemporaries; and how Constance Wilde finally glimpsed the flamboyant public persona of her otherwise devoted husband and father. (Length 19:31) The post Louis Bayard's Wilde appeared first on Reduced Shakespeare Company.

A Gallifrey One guest announcement tops the RFS headlines as Jenna Coleman aka Clara Oswald is set to arrive in Los Angeles this upcoming February! Plus Russell T Davies is in the latest SFX to explain how TV works to you nerds, so what better time for the Three Who Rule to add their uninformed insights to the pile? An Emperor Davros dolly is on the way from B&M, Ncuti Gatwa's theatrical spectacular The Importance of Being Earnest heads for cinema screens and more, before a Classic Series Commentary on the penultimate episode of both “Planet of the Spiders” and the Jon Pertwee era!  Links: Support Radio Free Skaro on Patreon Jenna Coleman announced as guest of Gallifrey One RTD says Season 3 renewal won't come until after Season 2 airs BFI redux screening of The Happiness Patrol on September 29 B&M 2024 Remembrance of the Daleks – Emperor Davros B&M 2024 The History of the Daleks #18 Ncuti Gatwa's The Importance of Being Earnest getting UK cinema release Doctor Who finalists for five BAFTA Cymru Awards (aka The Welshies) Breakdown of the first scene of The Power of the Daleks Commentary: Planet of the Spiders Episode 5

Playwright Alice Scovell (The Rewards of Being Frank) discusses her new comedy Kindred Spirits, a sequel to Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit now having its world premiere at Cincinnati Shakespeare Company (and featuring our own Austin Tichenor as Charles Condomine, whose late wives Elvira and Ruth return once again to stir up trouble). Scovell talks about how she gave Oscar Wilde's characters from The Importance of Being Earnest the seven-year-itch; how she's played around in the STU – the Shakespeare Theatrical Universe – through her sequel to Love's Labor's Lost; the challenges and rewards of negotiating with an author's estate; and how a life of theatergoing has led to a new life of theatre making. (Length 21:36)

Reviews of: The ITV comedy drama Douglas is Cancelled - a four part series written by Steven Moffat, starring Hugh Bonneville as middle-aged television broadcaster, Douglas Bellowes, who finds himself on the wrong side of 21st century social mores;A new exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield, Ronald Moody Sculpting Life, puts the spotlight on the Jamaican-born artist who engaged with key moments in 20th-century art;A new production at the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest which places the Victorian comedy in a world of social media and pink fluffy cushions; And a visit to the Craven Museum and Gallery in Skipton which has been shortlisted for the Art Fund Museum of the Year 2024 prize.Presenter: Nick Ahad Producer: Ekene Akalawu

In today's episode, we're discussing The Importance of Being Earnest by the ever-delightful Oscar Wilde. A classic example of British theater, this play is known for its biting social satire and brilliant comedic dialogue. Throughout our conversation, we dive into the play's themes, discuss Wilde's mastery of wordplay, and his ability to write characters that satirize Victorian society in the cleverest ways. As always, we share our complementary pairings, and we hope this episode adds a few books to your TBR pile!  If you love our extra nerdy discussion on the podcast today, we have a hunch that you would also love participating in our Novel Pairings Patreon community. Our Patreon is a great space to take part in public scholarship and talk about books with a smart group of readers. Subscriptions start at just $5 a month, and yearly discounts are available. To learn more about our Patreon, visit patreon.com/novelpairings.   Books Mentioned: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby Nevada by Imogen Binnie Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris The Best of Me by David Sedaris I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett Dr. No by Percival Everett What a Difference a Duke Makes by Lenora Bell On Beauty by Zadie Smith   Also Mentioned: Bonus: 127. An Introduction to The Importance of Being Earnest Hamlet by William Shakespeare Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead R. Eric Thomas