This year’s December production will be all about the theatrics of staging theatre. In a turbulent production, an amateur ensemble tries to put on ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ by Oscar Wilde. What could go wrong when staging the world’s most armature play? Spoiler: everything!
Social Media manager Lillian Kaufmann sat down with Director Josiane Segar to discuss her approach to theatre and directing, the difficulties and joys of rewriting a play and the main themes audiences can expect in ‘ETL fucks up the Improtance of Being Earnest’.
LK: Could you briefly tell us who you are?
JS: Sure, I’m Josiane Segar. I’m the vice-chair of ETL and I’ve been with ETL since 2021 on various different productions on the stage and behind the scenes and this is my second attempt at directing ever. Last year it was with the city-funded “New Voices” project for a 30-minute piece. So this year has been a much more ambitious attempt to direct a very large cast and a very ambitious play.
LK: We’ll be discussing your play today ‘ETL fucks up The Importance of Being Earnest’, some people might be familiar with the title but you’re putting a new spin on it, could you comment on that?
JS: Yes, exactly. We’re taking a very traditional piece ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ by Oscar Wilde, which at least some people will be familiar with and potentially already quite attached to, and we’re making it even more farcical. In essence, we are pretending to be an extremely incompetent group of amateur theatre makers who want to put on ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ and cannot manage at all because everything that we attempt to do fails spectacularly. So the emphasis is really not so much on the play itself but rather on the actors and director’s attempt to stage what should be a very easy play to stage but we can’t manage it.
LK: Oscar Wilde has been known to always have some sort of social critique in his plays. Is that still part of your play or is the focus shifted towards being entertaining?
JS: That’s a really good question, in the original, he’s criticizing Victorian society and it’s making fun of the power dynamics between men and women. So for example in the play, Gwendolyn takes on a more traditionally masculine approach to marriage and love, and Jack is the one that’s more romantic and less pragmatic, and blown away by his feelings, that kind of thing. There’s of course still that element in this play however the focus is shifted away from that towards something that’s really just fun and silly, and supposed to allow the audience to come into a show over Christmas time, and just have a good time. The main aim is that audiences come out and just feel happy.
LK: You said that a big part of the play is the fictional theatre company, what about the actual cast? I’ve heard that it’s quite a big production- you even have a band on stage.
JS: Yes, it’s for ETL is a very ambitious play, the cast is 11 people, including myself. I’m not just the director of the play; I’m the director in the play. We also have three musicians that come on stage.
There are also two assistant directors who are working with me, who’ve been wonderful and very necessary because it’s such a big production. All the actors have been involved in at least one ETL production beforehand, and that was deliberate on my part because the play is extremely ambitious. We are taking the original Oscar Wilde’s play, but our play is quite a deviation from that, so we had to do a huge amount of improv – it’s very tight choreography and quite demanding acting. I really wanted to work with people that I already had a relationship with, that I just knew I could trust, and also people that I knew could handle having a lot of things thrown at them and just deal with it in a professional way.
LK: You mentioned improv, could you take me through your process of rewriting the play?
JS: I took the play and the first thing I did was really heavily edit it because the type of play that we’re doing – which is ridiculously farcical – I think audiences can only deal with maximum 90 minutes of that, so I cut down the play to about a third of its original size. Then I already started adding in gag moments where I could already see that there would be fun places for us to fuck up.
Then I took the script to the cast, and we started walking through it on stage. During the improv stages we were trying out these gags and adding in new ones, and at this point it really became teamwork because everyone was bringing in their own ideas, trying things out – so we were working on it collaboratively.
Once we felt like we had a sequence of gags that could work, we locked it down and have just been practicing ever since to get the choreography really tight, because whilst things are fucking up, they have to fuck up in the right way for it to work. On the one hand it gives us a lot of freedom, on the other hand, it has to be really tightly done.
LK: That does sound like the humour is based in human connection or just human interaction. Thinking back on your first play ‘Echolalia’, it seems to be a big part of your directorial work. Would you like to comment on that?
JS: I think both with ‘Echolalia’ and with this, there’s been a large element of devising with my actors, so giving them a script but also giving them a lot of freedom to play around and work with it and bring their own ideas to the table. I find that such a joyful way of working because it means that instead of it just being my brain, I get to work with 10 other people that I really respect and love working with and who are brilliant, so the play becomes 10 times funnier as a result.
But in terms of human experience and human connection, I mean that’s ultimately what the underlying play is about, so we also had to still pay homage to that aspect of Oscar Wilde as well – he wrote a farcical play about human connection, so all we’re doing is just kind of exaggerating it.
LK: Could you elaborate on the term farce because that’s been mentioned a few times and needs a bit more explanation.
JS: Definitely! It’s also because I’m not sure whether it’s something that Germans are familiar with. It’s a huge part of British theatre and British humour – I mean this is another very English expression but it’s kind of “taking the piss out of something”. A nice way to think about it is that you’re taking ordinary situations and you’re making them ridiculous or very exaggerated. In every non-or semi-professional play there are always going to be blunders and mistakes, and normally they’re not funny because they’re not supposed to be happening. But here we’re making them exaggerated and very ridiculous, so that it becomes both funny for the people on stage and for the audience, so that we can enjoy this together. I think there’s something very universal about the human experience of failing and finding joy and humour in that as well, not taking it so seriously. Because it’s very difficult to get something perfect, even at an extremely professional level, even if you go to the West End or to Broadway, you’re still going to see people fucking up on stage. I think that’s something that everyone can connect to, even if you’ve never been in a theatre production yourself. I think that’s what we’re doing with farce here.
LK: I think it could also take away a bit of that anxiety of having to be perfect.
JS: Totally! It’s been such a refreshing approach because even in the rehearsals there was nothing that anyone could do wrong because anything that they did we could say ‘oh yes that was brilliant let’s bring it in’. And you know also on the night if something does actually go wrong, who cares, the audience aren’t going to know what was supposed to go wrong or what wasn’t.
LK: It’s always funny to me when theatre people make theatre about theatre. Is there inspiration that you have drawn from other productions you’ve been in?
JS: Yeah, definitely. From every production I’ve been in. I’ve worked with a whole range of characters, a whole range of people who are bringing in their personalities and approaches to theatre, and definitely drawn inspiration from that. Also things that have genuinely gone wrong in other productions in New Voices for example, the curtains never fully closed, which meant that you could always see what was happening when plays were changing or when people were moving across and I thought, you know what that’s actually very funny, and so now in our production we’re deliberately not closing the curtains at the beginning of the show so that the audience can see what’s happening behind set and the chaos of it, and we’ve created a whole gag out of that happening. And you know the idea of theatre making theatre about theatre, of course there are loads of other plays that have done that like ‘Noises Off’, ‘The Play That Goes Wrong’, these kind of things, it’s definitely not novel what we’re doing but those plays have found success for a reason because people really respond to farce on stage.
LK: Circling back, what was the particular inspiration behind going for an Oscar Wilde play? Was it your idea? Was it a collaborative idea?
JS: All of these things are always collaborative. I knew that I wanted to do a play like this. I knew that I wanted to do a very silly, farcical, humorous play that was going to be fun for people to watch over Christmas. I knew that I wanted to take the piss out of making theatre, and initially I was toying around with the idea of staging ‘Noises Off’ or ‘Play That Goes Wrong’ or something like that. But the rights are very expensive and there was also something fun about making it from scratch and having our spin on things – just toying around with the idea, talking to people.
LK: I have picked a quote from the original play – I don’t know if it’s still in your version, but the quote is: ‘To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up’. Would you like to comment on that? I think it’s interesting especially in a theatre context.
JS: That quote has been cut, it’s not in this production, but I would say generally I really like naturalistic acting if we’re now talking about it within a theatre context.
That’s normally the way that I approach my acting however what I would say for this production it’s very apt because no one is acting natural on stage, we are all caricatures of certain things, we’re all exaggerating things. In a way as Oscar Wilde says, that is actually easier to do – it’s easier to play a caricature of something than it is to really depict a natural human or how a natural human would act. Luckily, we’re kind of free of that from this production and it gives us a lot of space and freedom to play around.
LK: But as far as theatre history goes, that whole over-the-top being caricatures has a big tradition in for example ‘commedia dell’arte’. To revive that and put it back on stage and break out of that post-modern circle of having to be serious on stage is really refreshing.
JS: I think that’s a good point, we always forget that there are fashions and trends in theatre as well.
LK: So, last question on the list: what can the audience expect? Is there something you would like them to know, something they should be prepared for?
JS: They shouldn’t expect to see a faithful rendition of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’. They will be very disappointed. They shouldn’t expect to necessarily be able to follow the plot completely either. What they should expect is to have a lot of fun, to have zero intellectual stimulation – just to have a really good time and hopefully come out feeling cheery on a cold wintry night in Leipzig.
‘ETL fucks up The Importance of Being Earnest’ will premiere on December 5th at the Neues Schauspiel Leipzig. More Information and tickets are available on the Neues Schauspiel Website.