“Layers and layers and layers”: that’s how director Alistair Newton describes The Importance of Being Earnest, running at the Grand Theatre in London, Ontario.
Oscar Wilde’s late-19th-century classic revolves around the double lives of two men who both adopt the alias “Ernest” in society. Wilde was arrested while the show was playing, at the height of his fame. His subsequent conviction and imprisonment for homosexual acts are believed to have led to his early death in 1900 at age 45.
After seeing a preview performance, I spoke with Newton over the phone about his directorial take on the show, which leans into the queer code and paradoxical playfulness of the work.
Newton also wrote an additional text, “On the Language of Fans,” which the characters of Gwendolen and Miss Prism present as an aside before the play. As the characters explain the different meanings of fan placements and movements — for example, touching the fan to one side of the cheek means “I love you” — they get audiences thinking about what messages might be hidden in every detail.
Each act of the show is colour-drenched, with set design by Michelle Tracey and costume design by Judith Bowden working in same-hued lockstep. In Act One, we see emerald suits and sofas while the characters have tea: cucumber sandwiches, pistachio-green macarons. Act Two is sunny, with oversized flowers, butter-coloured dresses, and canary-yellow suits. And Act Three embraces scarlet from the piano to every last book on the shelf.
Newton has also added a historical figure to the show: Ernest Boulton, a.k.a. Lady Stella, a 19th-century drag queen. Played by Billy Lake, Stella appears before, after, and between the three acts (presented with a single intermission). She’s sometimes on stage, and sometimes in the theatre’s box seats, where she sings and engages directly with the audience.
Her performance adds yet another layer to the play, and if you listen intently to what she’s singing, you can pick up on even more clues and Easter eggs — there’s a couple of references to the Grand Theatre itself, for example. But she also adds an element of magic that has the potential to vary each night. At the performance I attended, during Stella’s final song, when she gently called out to an audience member, he fully leaned into the interaction, waving an impromptu handkerchief (his scarf) as she blew him a kiss and the audience swooned. It became the most memorable moment of the show for me, and added another layer to this enduring and surprising play.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about the addition of Lady Stella. What does she add to the play?
We have all these ideas about what the Victorian period is about. And a lot of those things are true, that there was sexual repression and a kind of high moral tone.
There were [also] all of these extraordinary radical figures who were sort of pushing back against that world. Oscar Wilde, of course, is one of them. And an unknown great heroine-slash-hero of the queer rights movement is Ernest Boulton, which was Stella’s name out of drag.
Trying to use Stella to not only rescue this really important figure, who’s unknown to most contemporary audiences, but to include her into a play that is about transformation, disguise, persona — that’s part of it.
And just the whole idea of putting on the drag, there’s something that feels quite right in terms of trying to get people to listen and see something that they think they know in a new way.
You mentioned a desire to rescue Lady Stella/Ernest Boulton from being forgotten. Are there other reasons for choosing a real historical figure?
Stella and her friend Fanny, another drag queen, got arrested for going to the Strand Theatre in drag in 1869.
[At their trial in 1870], their lawyer argued that they were just play-acting, it was just a fun lark they were having. It worked. They got off because the judge said, ‘We don’t have those kind of problems in England.’ Those are French problems.
25 years later, when Oscar Wilde goes on trial, he has become so famous internationally that he created the very visibility that allowed his society to point at him and go, ‘That’s what a homosexual is.’ Wilde was indicted.
The very fact that Ernest Bolton was a real person in 1869 is largely the point of placing her into the context and the frame of that play, because it’s a challenge to all these ideas we have about the Victorian period.
That’s such an interesting parallel between those two court cases. That almost speaks to drag itself, because drag performances often play with elements of concealing and revealing identity, sometimes highlighting transformations or expression of the authentic self. The more famous you get, the more of a problem it becomes for you, in some ways.
Exactly.
The whole production, the idea is, if you don’t have access and are not interested [in] all of the code that’s underneath it, you can just go and enjoy it.
But the entire physical production has been enacted to get people to try to keep their ears and their eyes open to all the code that Wilde has placed into the play.
Even the title, The Importance of Being Earnest — it’s a reference to Love in Earnest from 1892, a volume of poetry by a guy called John Gambril Nicholson. It was dedicated to a boy he was in love with. His name was William Ernest Mather. The first line of that poem is ‘Some lightly love, but mine is Love in Earnest.’
Oscar Wilde claimed that he wrote the play just to pay off his creditors. And he was really insistent on that. You could find all these letters of him writing to friends and saying, ‘This play is quite nonsensical and has no serious interest.’ But then he fills it with all of this queer, subversive subtext.
Oscar pretended that he was writing this frivolous diversion, and yet it’s full of all this code that people with a tuned-in ear — other marginalized folks, queens, they would hear it and they would get it.
Obviously, he lived in a very different time period, and his work is reflective of that time period. But, if he could see the play today, what he would think of it?
I think he would love the design of it, because it’s so based on what was really exciting and radical in his period.
The second act is all based on the work of Aubrey Beardsley, a friend of his [and] the publisher of the Yellow Book, which was this subversive journal of avant-garde thought at the time.
The green [in the first act] is all based on the green carnation, which was the symbol that Wilde and his followers all used to identify each other. At the opening night of Lady Windermere’s Fan, another of his plays, all these queens were there wearing these green carnations in the buttonholes of their jackets. So all the straight people didn’t know what that meant, but you could look across the aisle and go, ‘Ah, there’s one.’
The red in Act Three is because Oscar Wilde had a vermilion office at his house. Downstairs, it was like what we would consider a modern interior where he lived with his wife and his kids, and then upstairs he had this bright red office where he was writing all these subversive, coded essays on socialism.
I think he would appreciate all that. Would he be appalled that I tampered with his writing? Probably, yeah. But he was a fan of Ernest Boulton, and knew all about Stella. I think he’d be very interested in it, but he would have wanted to do the rewrite himself.
If he had lived to see a slightly more progressive time, do you think he might have written a character like Stella into a play himself?
Wilde could have lived into the ‘20s and even into the ‘30s. There is radical stuff going on there.
Had Oscar lived he could have been friends with Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, and all those amazing people. He would have been this elder statesman of a kind of aesthetic tradition that everyone else was able to carry on without him, but was carried on in his name.
You certainly wouldn’t get the career of Noël Coward without Oscar Wilde. They both were writing in code, and they both were very subversive and extremely populist. And that’s the game that I’m trying to play with this production.
The Importance of Being Earnest runs at the Grand Theatre until April 12. More information is available here.
Caelan Beard wrote this feature as part of ON Criticism: The 2025/26 Theatre Critics Lab, a collaboration between the Grand Theatre, Talk is Free Theatre, Tarragon Theatre, Theatre Aquarius, and Intermission.
WRITTEN BY
Caelan Beard
Caelan Beard (she/her) is a freelance journalist, communications specialist, and author from southwestern Ontario. She is excited to be a part of ON Criticism: The 2025/2026 Theatre Critics Lab, a collaboration between Intermission and four Ontario theatres. In addition to theatre, she loves books, being outside as much as possible, and driving around Ontario in search of baked goods.
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