What: The Importance of Being Earnest
Where: Roxy Theatre, 2657 Quadra St.
When: To July 17
Tickets: $36 to $46 (at the Roxy box office or 250-383-3370)
Work in theatre long enough and you’ll eventually go from playing the ingenue to playing the ingenue’s mom.
At least, that’s the experience of Laurie Paton, co-starring with her husband Norman Browning in Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre’s new production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
Paton and Browning are veteran stage actors. She’s completed her 18th season with the Shaw Festival. Browning, who began his career in 1968, has done 23 seasons at Shaw.
Twenty-two years ago, Paton played love-struck Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest. Now she’s playing Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen’s imperious mother.
“I’m playing her mom. Now we get the old roles,” said Paton, laughing.
Like many actors, she’s reluctant to reveal her age, merely saying: “I’m between 35 and 57.” Browning (who sidestepped the age question by quipping “I’m too old”) once played Gwendolen’s lover Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest. This time, he has the role of Reverend Chasuble.
Directed by Fran Gebhard, the Blue Bridge production includes Kholby Wardell as Algernon, James Kot as Jack Worthing, Kassianni Austin as Gwendolen and Grace Wolf as Cecily.
Victoria theatregoers may recall Paton and Browning from the Belfry Theatre’s production of David French’s comedy Jitters in 2011. She played a fading stage star; Browning portrayed a buffoonish actor who frets over his squeaky shoes.
Although also a comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest is a vastly different proposition from French’s 1979 romp. First performed in 1895, it’s an epigram-crammed comedy of manners that satirizes the hypocrisy of upper-class Victorian society.
Some might assume a period piece like this would be breeze for Paton and Browning, because of their Shaw Festival backgrounds. The couple say such experience does help. Even so, it’s never easy navigating a play such as The Importance of Being Earnest, which calls for stylized speech and a certain way of carrying oneself.
“It’s still very challenging. We’re still Canadian actors doing English accents,” Paton said.
For years, Paton and Browning divided their time between Niagara-on-the-Lake, home to the Shaw Festival, and the West Coast. Now they’re based in Vancouver.
Browning, a Vancouver native, originally intended to be a lawyer. He attended Simon Fraser University, where, for a time, he became embroiled in the student activism of the 1960s.
“I protested the war in Vietnam and particularly the invasion of Cambodia in 1968,” Browning said. He remembers being injured during a Peace Arch demonstration, where police attacked protesters with sticks and dogs.
Paton, who was born in High River, Alta., dreamed of becoming a nurse as a girl. However it was purely a “Florence Nightingale romantic notion.” Paton soon realized her true passion was for acting.
The couple met and fell in love during their time at the Shaw Festival. So they married, despite Browning’s early promise to himself: never marry an actor.
Paton and Browning have acted in plays together only half a dozen times before. And they’ve portrayed a husband and wife on just a couple of occasions.
Paton joked: “You see, he’s so much older than me, they never cast us as couples.”
