Nancye Hayes readies herself to play Lady Bracknell. Image: supplied.
Billed as ‘a serious comedy for trivial people’, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest has never gone out of fashion. Even as Wilde himself was languishing in jail in 1895 on charges of ‘gross indecency’ soon after the play’s premiere, Earnest had its Australian premiere in Melbourne, and was an immediate success.