SOURCE: Review of The Importance of Being Earnest. Critic 23, no. 688 (27 April 1895): 316.

In the following review of The Importance of Being Earnest, the critic praises the play as lighthearted.

This three-act farce, one of the latest productions of Oscar Wilde, which has been running successfully for a number of weeks in London, was presented at the Empire Theatre on Monday evening, and met with a most favorable and often very merry reception. The piece is of the lightest possible texture, and never was intended to be subjected to the test of serious consideration or analysis. Its story is a whim, and its personages are mere vehicles for the utterance of those epigrammatic conceits which constitute so large a share of its author's literary stock in trade. When the curtain rises, two young fashionable idlers are exchanging experiences. John Worthing, known in London as Earnest, confesses that in the country...