Edinburgh 2022: Josh King Guest Blog

Guest Blog: Say It Again Sorry bring a twist on a classic to Fringe with the Importance of Being... Earnest?

Josh King discusses how the company take a classic and twist it

Company member and resident writer Josh King breaks down how the Say It Again Sorry team find things to go wrong when developing the show, and what he thinks Oscar Wilde would make of this adaptation.

The Importance of Being... Earnest? is a riotous twist on the classic Oscar Wilde play, in which the audience must step in to save the show when the cast start dropping like flies.

When we first started the process of rewriting The Importance of Being Earnest and turning it into an interactive piece of theatre, we knew that we wanted the audience to be the key to the play succeeding. When a cast member drops out of the show, the 'director' quickly replaces them with a willing member of the audience, who takes on that role, and all it entails, until the end. And they are needed from the very beginning, too, when Ernest himself fails to show up.

It's a dramatic start, and really sets the tone for the fun-filled chaos that is to come. But it also means that there were a lot of questions to answer when we started developing the show. Not least, how do we introduce justifiable reasons for the cast to keep dropping out? How do we find ways to disrupt the show?

A lot of our ideas came, naturally, from cliches or tropes within the acting world, such as an actor not being able to improvise themselves out of a sticky situation, suddenly landing a better role or showing off to the point that they lose their voice. This method is fun because we love to show that the audience members are actually far more reliable than the actors ever were.

Another great technique for coming up with ways to disrupt the play is to think about a creative activity that an audience member would enjoy doing and then find a way that it can be used to advance the plot. We want to empower the audience as artists as well as put on a play, so why not do both at once? Things like painting a portrait, writing poetry and dancing a tango are perfect to allow the audience to be truly creative while still keeping the show moving forwards.

It is, however, the most straightforward method that proved the best when coming up with ideas to 'break' the play. Simply put, wondering what would really happen often worked better than anything else. The play's first problem and solution - Ernest not showing up and being recast with an audience member - would undoubtedly set off a chaotic chain of events that would affect every cast member in some way. By following this chain step by step, we imagined how a real cast might react and what else would inevitably go wrong. The more truth there is to the events onstage, after all, the more fun it is to watch.

Our greatest tool though (and this might sound like cheating) is having an extremely talented cast that willingly put themselves in the nightmare scenario of not knowing what will happen next. Because, in spite of everything I've just written here, the real way we break the show is... to literally break it. We really do need the audience to step in and save the play. But of course, as soon as they are up there, there's no telling what might happen.

We'd like to think Oscar Wilde himself wouldn't begrudge us too much for the liberties we've taken with his play. In fact, he would probably be the first person to put up his hand and step into the role of Ernest when he sees how much fun the audience are having.

After all, his original play dealt with characters pretending to be people that they weren't and discovering the joys of leading a double life, so it's only right that the audience finally get to enjoy that too.

The Importance of Being...Earnest?, Pleasance Courtyard (Beyond), 1.30, 3-28 August (no day off)

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Photo credit: Mann Bros

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