Stratfordganza Day 1: He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his doctors!

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The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
- Oscar Wilde
The Importance of Being Earnest
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Because I know that punctuality is not one of Mr. Gilby's strong points (though he has many), I wisely planned to arrive in Toronto by noon. Our first play wasn't until 8 PM.

This was good thinking, because Gilby was expected to make a stop at work lunch, where one of his work crew was celebrating his birthday. So we stopped in at the Indian restaurant for lunch. They were lots of fun and A Pleasant Time Was Had by All.

Then we took the 2 hour drive to Stratford. It's a very cutesy sort of place, though probably prettier in summer.

Here is Finger Puppet Oscar as we enter his hometown. (FP Oscar was born in Stratford, where Mrs. Bacher adopted him and gifted him to me. We brought FP Oscar and Beanie Yoda with us.)

I was most worried about our hotel (Foster's Inn), because I could only rely on online reviews of it. But it was great. It was a funky little place, and I considered stealing much of the furniture. (In the end I only thefted the room key, which I have promised to return by mail.)


Gilby brought True Blood with him, he wanted to force upon me--so we sat on the bed together and watched episodes, in between meals and plays.

Back to the tale... here we are at Othello's. We were going to eat at the hotel restaurant, but were informed by the Funky Wait Staff that they were booked solid, and Othello's would be the only place in town with room because (a) they were big and (b) their food sucked. Both proved to be true, but that was fine. Pictured here: the boyz, with cranberry juice--for some reason that's all I drank the whole time.

Our play that night was The Importance of Being Earnest by my fave fave fave writer, Oscar Wilde.

Here we are waiting for I of BE to begin. We tried to take our own photo but Gilby looked like a madman, I looked scheming, and the boyz looked like they were falling down drunk.
So Gilby asked the girls next to me to take our pic.

The I of BE was the show we both enjoyed the most. Gilby had never read/seen a Wilde play, so he was delighted by the fantastico humour.

The I of BE was my fave Wilde play as a girl, but the recent movie version ruined it for me, even though it starred my #1 Actor Boyfriend Rupert Everett, playing one of my Top Character Boyfriends, Algernon Moncrieff. The film was by the same dudes who did one of my fave movies of all time, Wilde's An Ideal Husband (also starring my #1 Boyfriend in one of my favourite roles) but the director completely missed the boat on this one. It's not the LEAST bit funny (as you can see on youtube). Ugh. I was soooo disappointed, and haven't returned to the play since.

Thank heaven for Stratford. And for Brian Bedford who played Lady Bracknell and was HI-larious. We lahffed and lahffed. This was our favourite bit: Algernon has always used his invented invalid friend as an excuse to escape from Lady Bracknell, and in this scene he kills off Bunbury...

Lady Bracknell. Dead! When did Mr. Bunbury die? His death must have been extremely sudden.

Algernon. [Airily.] Oh! I killed Bunbury this afternoon. I mean poor Bunbury died this afternoon.

Lady Bracknell. What did he die of?

Algernon. Bunbury? Oh, he was quite exploded.

Lady Bracknell. Exploded! Was he the victim of a revolutionary outrage? I was not aware that Mr. Bunbury was interested in social legislation. If so, he is well punished for his morbidity.

Algernon. My dear Aunt Augusta, I mean he was found out! The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live, that is what I mean—so Bunbury died.

Lady Bracknell. He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians. I am glad, however, that he made up his mind at the last to some definite course of action, and acted under proper medical advice.

Gilby was so excited that he had to have his own Oscar finger puppet. And I had to buy a doll-sized Oscar, even though I feared he would upstage Oscar FP and Beanie Yoda. Gilby grew tired of my vacillating and made me buy him.

Brian Bedford as Lady Bracknell (from a CBC article):

One of the funniest battleaxes in the history of English comedy, the role has been played on stage and screen by the likes of Dame Edith Evans and Dame Judi Dench – and at Stratford, memorably, by the late, great William Hutt. His Lady Bracknell in the festival's 1975 production – revived twice – has become the stuff of legend. That's doubtless what inspired Stratford's new artistic chief, Des McAnuff, to suggest Bedford do the part.

"When he told me, I said, 'Oh my God, really? I'll have to think about that,'" Bedford says during an interview in the living room of his long-time Stratford home – a tastefully refurbished Ontario cottage. He's barefoot and wearing sweats – a disarmingly casual look for a member of festival royalty. He says he went back and reread Wilde's play and decided it would be the perfect left-field followup to his last Stratford outing two seasons ago. "What do you do after you've done King Lear?" he asks. "Lady Bracknell seemed to fill the bill."

..."I realized I had to be as utterly convincing as Lady Bracknell as Barry Humphries is with Dame Edna," he says. "Of course, you know it's Humphries you're watching, but you don't think about that – you're just absolutely flabbergasted and absorbed by this crazy woman that he's giving you. I thought how important that was: there mustn't be any hint of a man playing a woman."

And from the NYT review:

Without sacrificing a single of Lady Bracknell’s withering bons mots, he avoids the stridently arch and the obvious. A single word — “Found?” — spoken in a tone of hushed stupefaction sets the audience roaring no less than that peerless joke about losing both one’s parents seeming like “carelessness.” The trick to making a male Lady Bracknell into something more than a camp joke is to take her as seriously as she takes herself. That’s no mean feat, of course, but Mr. Bedford performs it with forthrightness that inspires admiration, riding the crests of Wilde’s language like a great galleon in full sail. [Once you've seen the production you realize how accurate this review is. I can still hear that "FOUND?" in my head!]

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To see how horribly unfunny the movie was, you can see this exchange at the end of this scene on youtube:

It couldn't be less funny.

This version (at minute 6) is much better. And Bedford was even better.