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Well, most of the actors, I'm lucky to say, I've worked with. The two men, Gregory Wooddell
and Tony Roach, I've worked with twice. They're wonderful, uh, accomplished, beautifully,
um, experienced in playing the classics. They speak very well, and they're easy on the eye,
which is always a help.
Miss Prism is played by—going to be played by an extraordinary actress, called Patricia
Conolly, who, years ago, I played with as "Anthony and Celopatra." We played that together—and
Miss Prism—she's a great comic actress. Lady Bracknell is going to be played by a
Welsh actress, whom I've known since she was 17, Siân Phillips, who's known, perhaps to
a lot of American audiences, for her performance in "I, Claudius," which she kept winning huge
awards for, BAFTA awards, which is the equivalent of our Oscar.
And the designer, um, Simon Higlett, designed every play I've done, not just in this country,
but in England, and he's a superb designer. Uh, and the costume designer has designed
every play that I've done here. He also is a superb designer, Robert Perdziola. He designs
very attractive clothes, and I think audiences like seeing attractive women in beautiful
clothes. I once asked, um, the great couture, Valentino, what his great success was as a
couture. He said, "I design clothes that women like to wear," and Robert Perdziola does that.
They're clothes, they're not for freaks. I'm not doing any strange take on the show. I'm
not setting it in an amenity tip. I'm setting it absolutely as Wilde wrote it. I'm not playing
around with that. I'm not using—asking Bob to design curious costumes, as a taker. If
you look at the photographs of the original production in 1895, the characters onstage
are dressed like the characters in the audience, and that's what it should be. They're real
people. The happ—they're real people who happen to speak this extraordinary language,
but they're not freaks, they're not comedy players, and I've seen it done when the director
and the design and has put a sort of comic—the play doesn't need that help. That's what makes
it funny, that they're recognizable human people, but they're speaking this extraordinary
language.