by Oscar Wilde
Produced by Martyn C. Webster
In this play Oscar Wilde's farcical irony was exercised on a common subject, the marrying and giving in marriage of four young people in the London society of the 1890s; and bachelors had often invented a younger brother or a Bunbury to enable them to get to or away from town without losing face. When Wilde set Lady Bracknell sitting in inquisitorial enquiry on Jack's social position, his income and antecedents, he was tilting at the social hierarchy of his own time, standing it on its head, and inviting all London to laugh at it.