… Earnest? Comes to Theatre Royal – preview

A real treat for you at Theatre Royal, Brighton as Say It Again, Sorry? presents a one-of-a-kind, different-every-night comedy sensation, perfect for fans of The Play That Goes Wrong and Noises Off!

When a traditional production of Oscar Wilde’s classic play gets underway, everything seems to be going perfectly to plan… that is, until the lead actor fails to arrive on cue and an audience member is chosen to star in the show.

You might think you know this chaotic story of love, mistaken identity and double lives, but you have never seen it like this before. Filled with wicked Wildean wit and bursting with Bunburying, join us for a hilarious and unpredictable twist on the world’s favourite comedy classic.

I spent some time chatting to director/writer Simon Paris to find out more about him and the show for you.

You’re known for your writing, directing and performing and interactive theatre work. But when and how did you start working in theatre?

So, so yeah, I’ve studied at Middlesex University and actually my journey into my experience of that was that I didn’t really gel with the course that well and I’ve kind of never really dealt well with education. Anyway, so instead of just moping around and being annoyed, which I’ve done in the past, instead, every time I got my student loan I would then use that student loan to hire a venue in London and put on a show with my friends. I did that alongside the degree and working in a bar, so I’d put on a couple shows every year with the student loan. I went into it wanting to direct and no one would hire me as a director so I’d just hire myself on the show I wanted to do. I was doing that throughout my degree and when I’d finished, essentially, I’ve just carried on doing that, but instead of getting student loans, finding people who are interested in my work, who want to invest in it.

When did you branch out into the improvisational work?

You know, the interesting thing with Earnest is we walk an interesting line that it seems like an improv show, but there’s actually a very tightly script. Well, I suppose the audience members that we cast in the show are improvising the whole time, but whereas if you ever see our script, it looks more like a big tree of decisions of certain things that can happen. We offer audience members different routes and if they take a certain option, then the script follows a different path. So although I do love improv, this particular show is actually very controlled and very tightly scripted.

And that’s The Importance Of Being Earnest, isn’t?

Well, we actually retitled it on this tour and it’s just called …Earnest?

The old title used to be The Importance Of Being Earnest ..? but we found that on our last tour, a few too many people were coming, thinking they were actually seeing the original play. So we just wanted to help clear that confusion up a bit and thankfully on this tour, it seems like everyone knows what they’re actually seeing.

You said that you know this is scripted with sort of different sort of roads going off. What’s your process as you start on a new production? Do you write it and then give it to your actors?

The way that the company works is that there’s seven of us. My role in it is that I produce, direct and co-write the show and there’s another co-writer called Josh King. Our process so far has been, and the process is always evolving, was we wrote a couple of scenes and then we brought it to the larger group in a rehearsal room and then tested stuff out. Then depending on how that workshop went, we then went back into the writers’ room. That was a combination of me, me and Josh, Josh, on his own or the cast. But yeah, it has been quite a long time. I’ve been developing this one for six years. Something that was interesting on the last tour is that I was on the road with the touring company and we did about 150 shows on the tour. The morning after every show we do notes, rewrite the show, edit it, tweak it and we did that for the entire tour. Every single day there were notes and that seems like an integral part of the developing development of the show. Really, we can only take it so far in the rehearsal room and then. It’s actually seeing it live in front of an audience is where the real work starts to happen, I think.

So these the people that you pull up from the audience to actually be on stage – how do you choose them?

Good question. So there is a character in the play called Simon, the director, which is very confusing because it’s not me. It’s someone playing Simon, the director, and over the years he’s managed to get a really good skill of being able to look at a room of 1000 people and just make eye contact with people and see who’s kind of in the right mood? Who wants that kind of challenge? You know, we don’t really want people who don’t want to be there. So, if they if they aren’t volunteering with their eyes, we don’t really invite them up and if people are a bit too overly keen and want to prove something or almost performing their own thing to an audience we also don’t really want them. My dream person that we get is someone that’s on the cusp and just requires a little bit of convincing just to get them over the line, so they’re a little bit reluctant, but then they make a choice to be brave for a couple of seconds, and they’re always my favorite people cause then. You can see them grow and you see them go from a kind of like reluctant hero and then at one point they’ve embraced what’s going on and you see something’s changed in them.

A lot of people, normally the first thing they ask me is “are you gonna force me to go up if I don’t want to?” I think the thing that maybe makes people reluctant to go is that they think that they are going to be embarrassed. I guess our knowledge in England, especially of interactive stuff in theatre, is usually a panto, and it’s usually done to kind of like embarrass the audience member.

But we’ve kind of turned that on its head and the whole question for us of making these shows is: how do you turn a random person into a hero? So every single joke that’s read it and every single line that’s rent is designed to up their status and make them. Go on a journey to be a hero and it’s never trying to embarrass them. So that’s kind of the big challenge of the show because it’s easy. Anyone can embarrass an audience member, but it’s much harder to create a journey where they become a star and then after each show we do a meet and greet in the foyer and our audience cast are also part of that. Then you do actually see that they become a celebrity, and you have people asking for their autographs and taking photos with them. I speak to a lot of my friends that go and at the beginning they’re like, “I’m not going up” and then at the end, they say “you know what? If I got asked I actually really would have liked it” and that’s really great.

Is there an experience with an audience member that is particularly memorable?

You know what? Every show we do, there’s something absolutely crazy that happens. I’ve seen the show over 230 Times Now and I still look forward to it and I’m still on the edge of my seat every single time because it feels like opening night every night. One of the kind of standout stories that I like to think about is when we’re on tour last year and we visited Darlington Hippodrome which is a big 1000 seat venue.

There’s a point in the show where the the character who plays piano accidentally breaks his arm, and we must find someone in the audience that can play the piano. The director asks who here can play the piano and then at the top of the third row we hear someone say “I can play piano, but you’re never gonna get me down because I’m in a wheelchair”. So the director looks around and chats to one of the front of house staff like can we? Can we make this happen? I was like, okay, we’re bringing you down. So we organized the front of house to get this person to come down and they get set in place whilst I think the director put in like an impromptu Q&A to cover the time it took to. We get them down and then the moment comes where they can play something and they play like an amazing song on piano and there’s like, you know, huge applause. It was a really good moment. It’s always a great moment but then afterwards, we spoke to the person and they said that basically it was someone, I think in their mid 60s, and they’d been a piano teacher for 40 years and they’ve never had an opportunity to perform on a stage because no theatre had ever been accessible for them. So that was the first time they’ve ever performed and it was to 1000 people in Darlington. and just the impact that has of just inviting people up but don’t normally get the chance to be on stage. That’s kind of what the whole show is really about.

But that’s an extra bit of magic that this this was their first performance – remarkable.

And we have those kind of crazy stories every week on this tour. We know we kind of sell this show, we have to market it to get the people in as a kind of, you know, a fun night out. But then I think everyone goes through that realization halfway through that this isn’t just a comedy play, this is a whole other thing we’re seeing here. And I really like that because it means like it’s just the epitome of you have to be there. There’s no two shows are alike. So yeah, that’s kind of what I love about it.

On this tour, you’re coming to Brighton Theatre Royal. What are your dates on that?

Yes. We’re there 28th and 29th May. And I’m also personally coming down to those because I really love Brighton and I really want to see the theatre there.

And have you played in Brighton before? I presume you have.

So something that’s quite interesting is that we’ve only played at the Brighton Fringe and in one of the kind of small pop-up venues. We always looked at the Theatre Royal and said if we make it there, we’ve made it. So actually it is a bit of a homecoming coming back to Brighton, but in the theatre that we’ve really been admiring.

Do you have any advice for artists hoping to get involved in the type of theater in which you work?

Good question. Yeah, it’s hard to say because I feel like we got so lucky making this whole thing work. It’s almost like. Someone that wins the lottery sharing their numbers as a way to win. But I think the I think the key really is like for us at least. The whole way we put the team together was it was figuring out which of our friend like who’s in our friend group and who can who, who, who can we work with. And even if the show doesn’t become a big success. Who will we enjoy spending all of that time with? Because you spend so much time with them that even if we, you know, stayed at the same level we were at six years. To go. We’re just hanging out with friends anyway. It’s not wasted time. I found that maybe my advice generally as an individual creative is that as long as you can figure out how to enjoy the time you’re spending on the on the art, rather than being like okay, when I make it, I’ll start to have a good time, if you can have a good time while you’re really poor and no one wants to hire you, you can do that as long as you want.

28th and 29th May 2025 @ 7.30pm

Theatre Royal, Brighton

Tickets from £23.65

https://www.atgtickets.com/shows/earnest/theatre-royal-brighton/calendar/2025-05-28