Year: 1958-59
Title of the play: The Importance of Being Earnest
Author: Oscar Wilde
Director:
Others in the Cast:
Company/Event: New Zealand Players
Theatre and location: New Zealand National Tour
Other productions of the same play: 1977, dir. Tenniel Evans, The Actors’ Company at The Roundhouse, London. This time Peth played Dr Chasuble.
Plot summary: Jack Worthing uses his entirely imaginary, dissolute brother Earnest as an excuse to run up to town and woo the beautiful Gwendoline. His old friend Algernon Moncrieff finds out about this double life and turns up at Jack’s country house, posing as the brother.
Peth’s role: Algernon Moncrieff / Dr Chasuble in 1977
Reviews:
Production details:
Related links: Interview with Peth
While playing the part of Algernon Moncrieff in the New Zealand Players’ production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in 1958, he realized ‘that High Comedy like this was a physical thing as much as vocal. ... To find oneself effortlessly with one’s weight on the correct foot, to be able instinctively to know what to do — and more importantly what not to do — with one’s hands, to act with one’s whole body and soul within the confines of elegant West End drawing room comedy was to be ‘bounded in a nutshell and count oneself a king of infinite space’.’ Kathleen Riley
And from an EP interview, which clearly refers to the trip
back after the tour:
I was 23 when I read Wuthering Heights on
a ship, returning from working in New Zealand. I remember particularly reading of the familiar
Yorkshire landscape – so wild and yet close to my home, the then sooty
industrial town of Bradford –
as I looked out on sand and camels on our way through the Suez Canal. I heard some of the book again recently on a sadly
defunct digital station called One Word – the book was even better than I
remembered – in fact there were whole tracts of it I’d forgotten. I add
it to that lengthening list. - Interview with Vulpes Libres
Peth's NZ connection Edward Petherbridge was born in Bolton in 1939 and
brings an inestimable wealth of experience, talent and wisdom to the
Fortune production of King Lear. He has worked in New Zealand twice
before. In 1958-9 he was the leading man in the New Zealand Players
national tours of The Importance of Being Earnest and Spider's Web. He
also toured with the Players theatre in education quartet and took part
in NZBC radio dramas. He returned to New Zealand in 1976, touring the
South Island with the Royal Shakespeare Company presentations of The
Hollow Crown and Pleasure and Repentence. - Mediacom
Gallery:
