Rebecca Night
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Age: 22
Currently: Making her West End debut as 18-year-old Cecily Cardew amid the quipster-prone, cucumber sandwich-laden world of
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde's immortal classic. This latest West End incarnation of the ultimate comedy of manners is at the Vaudeville Theatre through April 26. Penelope Keith plays Lady Bracknell.
Hometown: Poole, Dorset, though her Yorkshire parentage meant Night had to focus on sustaining the proper, posh tones required for Wilde's inimitable tale of "bunburrying" and the best-known handbag in all of drama. "I had to do quite a lot of work on my accent," she says, laughing, speaking during a break in brush-up rehearsals in the run-up to her first London preview on 23 January. (The production toured last fall under the auspices of the Theatre Royal, Bath; the cast had eight weeks off before regrouping for the West End run.) "I sort of thought I had an RP accent," i.e. received pronunciation, says Night, "but working with Peter [the director Peter Gill] I realize there's a bit of Estuary creeping in now, which everyone seems to have a bit of." Not to mention those parentally fostered "Yorkshire O's."
Basic Training: Night has never previously played Wilde and, indeed, had not read
The Importance of Being Earnest prior to getting this job. So she's glad that her drama studies at Rose Bruford College included Shakespeare (
Twelfth Night and
The Tempest, for starters) as well as Restoration comedy. "Things like that are great training, because you get to use your voice technically, which is useful for Oscar Wilde; it's nice to get your mouth around big words and sentences, to use all those strong words." As for coming belatedly to the Wilde table, "this is a play that I had always wanted and intended to read, so I was quite lucky in a way, I guess, that I could come at it with fresh eyes." It helps, of course, to have a director in Gill who is one of the most seasoned and accomplished stagers there is. "Peter knows so much, so when rehearsals start at the beginning of the day, your brain has to work very fast to keep up; I feel like he knows everything."
Penelope Keith and Rebecca Night in
The Importance of Being Earnest
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From Fanny to Funny: Earnest represents the most sustained stage exposure so far for Night, who is about to experience her first taste of a proper commercial run: "I feel like you keep learning; you try and do your best every night." But British TV devotees will recognize the young actress from her unbuttoned, critically acclaimed occupancy of the title role in last fall's BBC adaptation of the seminally sexy novel,
Fanny Hill, based on the 18th-century novel by John Cleland. How does it feel going from such comparatively unbridled lust to the buttoned-up comedy of manners that is Oscar Wilde? "I guess in a way it's strange because
Fanny comes 100 years or however long it is before and yet it's so much more bawdy and open [whereas]
Earnest is so refined and restrained. It's all to do with manners; that was the Victorian influence. We were just doing the scene between the two girls today"—that's to say, between Cecily and Daisy Haggard's Gwendolyn—"and everything they want to say they have to disguise in the politest way possible."
Minx Coat: It's possible to think of Cecily as merely a doe-eyed ingénue but Night argues that there is more to her than that. "In a way, I think she's a little bit of a minx, and she's quite barmy, as well. She's really romantic and has all these ideas that she's going to marry Earnest even though she's never met him. My mum came to see the play on tour and said, `She's barmy,' but you forget that when you're playing her. To me, she seems open and pure and a bit of an idealist, really, and also quite firm. She sort of controls things. She's quite bossy with Earnest."
Tea Time: Has it been tricky for Night to think herself into the period mores and dress required by Wilde? "It takes a lot of practice to get your mouth around the words, to breathe in the corset and say all those long sentences and pretend it's easy. And I do drink lots of tea, yes. I'm a tea drinker, not a coffee drinker." Acting such a high-style text, Night says, "makes you want to stand a bit taller, and it's nice getting to play dress up and be kind of refined. But it's also nice to leave it all behind, at the end of the day to be able to put on your trainers and jeans."