LADY BRACKNELL’S CONFINEMENT
at the Theatre Building
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Written in 1987, this 45-minute one-act is a perfect vehicle for would-be Dame Edna Everages. Like that female impersonator, a star on British TV, Lady B. never doffs her female disguise (though she admits early on that she’s really a man), and as with Everage’s routines, much of the humor in Doust’s play derives from a single running gag: a man playing not just any woman, but a pretentious one. Lady Bracknell never uses short words or simple sentences when big, elaborate ones will do. She speaks of “indecorous intersection” instead of sex and “sartorial transmogrifications” instead of costume changes; and she’s prone to grandiose generalizations, a few of them fairly amusing: “A marked dislocation from Reality is fundamental to robust mental health,” for example.
But even Doust’s best lines fall far short of Wilde’s twisted zingers and the eccentric epigrams concocted by such Wilde-influenced writers as Quentin Crisp and Joe Orton. Striving for comic exaggeration, Lady Bracknell’s Confinement too often ends up just sounding fussy, as Lady B. regales us with the cautionary story of how William Gallfin, a dockworker’s son who wanted only money and position, ended up the wife of the demented Lord Bracknell.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Patricia Clay.
