The Importance of Being Ernest is usually a finely tuned comedy of manners, but in this delightfully derailed Fringe outing, manners were the very first thing to go. The premise was gloriously simple: the main players failed to appear. What followed was a theatrical gamble that paid off in uproarious, unpredictable fashion as audience members were drafted on stage to save the show.

Armed with scripts, good will and varying degrees of terror, the newly conscripted cast stumbled their way through Oscar Wilde’s beloved farce. Forgotten lines, misplaced entrances and abundance of laughter became part of the evening’s fabric, transforming a polished classic into a communal act of joyful sabotage. The brilliance lay not in perfection, but in the shared understanding that chaos was the point.

The production team acted as mischievous puppet masters, gently guiding the action while allowing the accidents to flourish. Wilde’s razor-sharp dialogue proved remarkably resilient, landing with unexpected freshness when delivered by performers clearly encountering it for the first time. A well-timed glance to the audience or a panicked whisper for help often earned bigger laughs than any rehearsed gag could.

What could have been a novelty stunt instead became a love letter to live theatre itself, fragile, thrilling and impossible to replicate. Each scene felt like it might collapse at any moment, and that constant edge-of-your-seat uncertainty made the experience electric.

This was Earnest stripped of pretence and bursting with heart: messy, hilarious and utterly Fringe. A reminder that sometimes the best theatre happens when everything goes wrong…. and everyone is in on the joke!

Ernest continues at The Peacock at Gluttony - Rymill Park until 22 March.