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Pan Pan
The Project Arts Centre
“This is experimental community drama”. These are words that have the potential to inspire optimism and abject terror in equal measure. In the case of The Importance of Nothing, the latter response is often the prevailing one. Lady Lancing has landed in an imaginary prison to deliver drama therapy to an unenthused trio of prisoners. The artistic and personal chaos that ensues explores the work of Oscar Wilde, principles of theatre practice, attitudes towards prisoners, homosexuality, and prejudice.
The Importance of Nothing looks at both the life and work of Wilde in a mischievous and insightful manner. Opening with a recording of two of the prisoners, by Mark O’Halloran and Andrew Bennett, discussing their experiences of growing up gay in Ireland, Aedín Cosgrove and Zia Bergin-Holly’s stunning set and lighting designs are brought to the fore, setting the atmosphere and scene of the drama to come.
The character of Lady Lancing, played by Una McKevitt, is an hilarious example of the worst sort of facilitator. Running the Wilde programme to alleviate her own ancestral guilt (she is, as everyone is regularly reminded, a descendant of Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, one of Wilde’s partners who contributed to his eventual imprisonment), she is quick to remind the prisoners of the favour she s doing them, to tell them that she is compensating for their lack of “rich inner lives.” She presents a supposedly open artistic space which she quickly reveals to be a closed vessel for her own ideas, she exoticises her husband whom she met in prison, and she displays enormous prejudice in her work. She is the nightmarish stereotype that any practitioner would live in fear of becoming; in short, she is an expertly constructed, memorable comic character.
While this production is a raucous comedy that leaves its audiences in tears of laughter, The Importance of Nothing sharply questions the assumptions people make about each other, and most specifically, the assumptions people make about prisoners. Through the lens of Wilde’s work, Pan Pan tackles a variety of subjects with cutting insight and humour.
The pacing is excellent, with effective changes of location and a sense of the progression of time throughout the drama therapy programme. However, the decision to end the production on one of Wilde’s lengthy letters to Douglas was one that was not entirely effective. Even though it is an interesting text and was delivered with intensity and skill by Judith Roddy, the letter cut the flow of the piece of and weakened the structure overall.
The Importance of Nothing is a fresh take on Oscar Wilde which blends the biographical and the literary to create a potent, entertaining, contemporary piece of theatre.
