The Importance of being Earnest has now closed and is replaced at The Vaudeville Theatre by “The Deep Blue Sea”
Vaudeville change - The Importance of being Earnest with Penelope Keith January 18, 2008
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Swimming with Sharks at the Vaudeville theatre ends on Saturday, January 19th to be replaced by Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of being Earnest” with Penelope Keith uttering the famous “handbag” line, in a piece of brilliant casting.
Cast: Penelope Keith, Janet Henfrey, Tim Wylton, William Ellis, Harry Hadden-Paton, Daisy Haggard, Rebecca Night, Maxwell Hutcheon, Roger swaine
Director: Peter Gill
Design: William Dudley
Lighting: Giuseppe di Iorio
Here is the famous dialogue:
Jack: Yes. The late Mr. Thomas Cardew, an old gentlemen of a kindly disposition found me and gave me the name of Worthing because he happened to have a first class ticket to Worthing at the time. Worthing is a place in Sussex. It’s a seaside resort.
Lady Bracknell: And where did this charitable gentlemen with the first class ticket to the seaside resort find you?
Jack: In a handbag.
Lady Bracknell: [closes eyes briefly] A handbag?
Jack: Yes, Lady Bracknell, I was in a hand bag. A somewhat large… black… leather handbag with handles… to it.
[pause]
Lady Bracknell: An ordinary handbag.
Lady Bracknell: And where did this Mr. James… or, Thomas Cardew come across this ordinary handbag?
Jack: The cloak room at Victoria Station. It was given to him in mistake for his own…
Lady Bracknell: [Shocked] The cloak room at Victoria Station?
Jack: Yes. The Brighton line.
Lady Bracknell: The line is immaterial.
[begins tearing up notes]
Lady Bracknell: Mr. Worthing. I must confess that I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. To be born, or at any rate bred in a handbag, whether it have handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life which reminds one of the worst excesses of the French revolution, and I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to?
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