Q & A with Brian Bedford, Director and Star of The Importance of Being Earnest

Ted Sod, Roundabout's Education Dramaturg, sat down with director and actor Brian Bedford to hear his thoughts on The Importance of Being Earnest and his character: Lady Bracknell.

Ted Sod: Let's start by talking about you. When did you realize you were going to be a man of the theatre?

Brian Bedford: As long as I can remember. Even before I knew the theatre existed I was an actor. It wasn't that I wanted to become an actor, I was one. When I was a tiny child, the radio was everything. The BBC had fewer programs than they do now but they had the BBC Third Program, which was a sort of cultural channel that did rather high falutin plays. I lived with my parents in a little semi-detached house, not unlike the one you see at the beginning ofBrief Encounter.

TS: Suburban?

BB: We lived in northern England in Yorkshire in a small town. My father was a postman and my mother worked in a weaving mill that made high quality woolen material - a specialty of the area. I came from a humble background, as they say. My mother was one of 13 children who came over from Ireland during the potato famine. My father started working in a foundry when he was 11 years old. Later on he took night classes and passed the exam to become a civil servant and a member of the post office. This was a great achievement for him. Unfortunately, I spent a lot of my childhood in an atmosphere of terminal illness. I had three elder brothers and two of them died of tuberculosis just before there was a cure for it. TB is a long, lingering disease. One young man was about 17 when he got TB and just before he died, he passed it on to the other brother. I was four when World War II broke out so there was the war going on along with all the illness in my family. I was more or less left to my own devices. I used to place an arm chair at an angle in the corner of our living room, sit behind it, and pretend to be a radio for hours and hours. It was great for my family because they could ignore me and get on with what they had to do. I remember doing a lot of acting by myself in the bathroom. Not elaborate stuff, just pretending to be someone else. I didn't go to the theatre till later. Leeds was the big city about five miles away and there was a weekly rep company at the Theatre Royal there. They did a different play every week, and Monday nights were half price because it was more or less a public dress rehearsal. An aunt of mine used to take my cousin and me. It cost four-and-a-half pennies each. It was marvelous.

TS: Where were you educated?

BB: I wasn't really educated at all. I was a complete dunce at the local school and left there when I was 15; got myself a job at a warehouse in Leeds and joined the Bradford Civic Playhouse, a very accomplished amateur dramatic society. Tony Richardson, who later became a highly successful film and theatre director, was part of the company and a lot of the other members eventually did extremely well in the professional theatre. I was terribly self conscience because I had a very strong Yorkshire accent and the others all seemed so grand and posh-sounding to me. When I was nearly 18, I bought a book called How to Become an Actor and discovered that there was a place in London called The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). I got myself down there (unbeknownst to my father), auditioned, and by some miracle managed to get in to this hallowed organization. Not only that, I got a scholarship which include a little bit of money to live on. This was all presented to my father as a fait accompli! In my class at RADA, there was Peter O'Toole who also came from Leeds. (His mother worked with my father at the Leeds post office.) There was also Albert Finney, Alan Bates and lots of other people who later became successful. There we all were, working class boys, all from the provinces, away from home for the first time, our lives just beginning, and all determined to have as good a time as possible, going to endless parties and seeing a lot of really wonderful theatre in London. We were mysteriously confident and felt that RADA was a very old fashioned organization.

TS: By this time Osborne and Pinter were writing plays, correct?

BB: Yes, lucky for us the theatre was starting to deal with working class people rather than with aristocrats. And that meant work for us. I got my first chance because of this new movement and through my roommate Alan Bates. He was a great friend of mine throughout his whole life; a wonderful actor and a beautiful guy.

TS: You came up for lack of a better word, in an amazing time in theatre: a golden era.

BB: Yes this radical change of direction proved to be quite historic.

TS: When did you make the transition to directing? Was that at Stratford?

BB: The first major thing I directed was in '77 or '78. Robin Phillips was the Artistic Director of Stratford Canada, where we had a very exciting and charismatic company including Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn, Peter Ustinov and Maggie Smith. Maggie and I had a wonderful partnership up there and had a terrific time doing lots of plays.

TS: Did you do Private Lives there?

BB: We did, probably the best production of the play either of us ever did. We also did Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, The Guardsman and As You Like It. Robin Phillips was trying to put together a season for the following year and I said, "why don't you let me direct a play?" And he came up with, of all things, Titus Andronicus! I was absolutely thrilled. I got Desmond Heeley (who has designed sets and costumes for the current production of The Importance of Being Earnest) to design it. That's when I started working with Desmond. His designs for Titus were out of this world. As indeed they are for Earnest.

TS: I read that you appreciate directing the plays of Shakespeare that are difficult to stage. Didn't you also do Coriolanus?

BB: Yes, and lots of others: Lear, Othello, Winter's Tale etc.

TS: Is there a play that you have yet to direct that you want to do?

BB: I'm directing The Misanthrope next year, a great Moliere play, but there are lots and lots of other plays I'd like to direct.

TS: You have this fidelity to Moliere and Shakespeare. How did that come about?

BB: When I was 21 or 22 I worked with great classical actor John Gielgud at Stratford-on-Avon [England]. I actually played Ariel to his Prospero in Peter Brooks production of The Tempest. He became my mentor and eventually a close friend of mine. I absolutely worshiped him. A lot of his principles and feelings about the theatre rubbed off on me. And since then I have pretty well devoted myself to the classics which, for me, has lead to a very interesting career. Since moving to the US almost 50 years ago I have spent about a third of that time at Canada's Stratford Festival, and that has really made my professional life.

TS: Tell me about The Importance of Being Earnest. Did you propose this to Des McAnuff, the current Artistic Director at Stratford, Ontario?

BB: No, he proposed it to me. Strangely I had never been a fan of the play; it seemed rather showy-offy to me, a sort of litany of aphorisms. So when Des said, "why don't you direct Earnest and play Lady Bracknell?" I wasn't entirely enthusiastic. However after reading it carefully a few times it was very clear that Lady B. was a wonderful part and I started to suspect there might be a way of doing the play in a more dimensional, organic way than I had seen hitherto.

Brian Bedford as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest; Photo Credit: Joan Marcus, 2010

TS: Tell me about directing yourself. Is that a challenge? You've done it before, correct?

BB: I think I've always to a certain extent directed myself. (I think most experienced actors do.) That's not to say that I haven't benefited immensely from great directors like Gielgud, Mike Nichols, Robin Phillips, Michael Langham and Joe Dowling. In fact it is a combination of their collective influences on me that provided me with whatever directorial skills I have. Even before I became a director I was fascinated by every single component of the production. And now I'm more interested than ever.

TS: What were you looking for in casting the actors? You have some top notch people.

BB: I was looking for people who could connect with Oscar Wilde's text and mine its extremely rarified reality. I wanted people who'd produce the opposite of the superficial acting I'd seen in previous productions. In other words proponents of George M. Cohen's theory that comedy is a very serious business. Wilde talked about the psychology of his characters. He wanted the comedy to be real. It is a very elusive style. It's obviously a satire which he described as "a serious play for trivial people". And behind the comedy there is something serious, even subversive, about this play. Wilde's view of the upper class society of his time was that they were empty-headed people who had far too much influence and power. They were taking their cue from the woman who was sitting on the throne of course. By this time, she was a bundle of morality and religiosity. It amazes me in all that I've read about Earnest that no one has likened Lady Bracknell to Queen Victoria. There is a similarity there. Oscar called it a farcical comedy and of course it is. Farces find their seeming reality only on a stage. This is the approach Desmond and I took with the design. But conversely, I'm convinced that what makes the play funny is that the characters actually believe what they are saying, and that makes Earnest hard for the actors because it's quite difficult to make these mad people organic. But if you can do that, you provide the audience a fuller experience of the play than if you don't. Wilde thought that these people were deeply stupid and hypocritical but of course they thought quite the opposite.

TS: Why has this play stayed in the repertory? Why is it a classic?

BB: Because basically human nature doesn't change. Today we have just as much stupidity, hypocrisy, pseudo-morality and obsession with money as existed in 1895. So Earnest is as meaningful today as it was 120 years ago. Also it's quite possibly the funniest play ever written.

TS: Wilde was such an acute social critic but he doesn't show his hand at all.

BB: No he keeps his characters completely unaware of their own delusion. They are not baddies and this is what makes them so scary as well as so funny. They are victims of their upbringing.

TS: He must have wanted the audience to see themselves and yet be able to laugh at themselves.

BB: Moliere and Shakespeare do the same.

TS: Shakespeare does it on all different class levels.

BB: Absolutely. You've used the "C" word: class. And that is an important theme in Earnest.

TS: It is tragic that Wilde never wrote another play after Earnest. His career was ended because of his private life.

BB: Yes he was a victim of the kind of hatred and intolerance that exists today. But poor Oscar, like a lot of artists, was a self-destructive, reckless soul. He claimed to have put his talent into his writing but his genius into his life. And indeed Oscar's friends and admirers said yes, his work was wonderful but the truly dazzling experience of Wilde was being in his presence and listening to his conversation. In Earnest, unlike his other plays, we actually get just that. Each character is endowed with Oscar's own facility for brilliant talking. So, assuming that his self-assessment was correct, we the actors (and more importantly the audience) get the double whammy of Oscar's talent and his genius. What a treat!

You can see Brian Bedford in The Importance of Being Earnest at the American Airlines Theatre, now playing through March 6, 2011.