The Importance of Being Earnest

Jack Worthing

Guardian to Cecily in the country, Ernest to everyone in town. The name he invented to buy his freedom is the one thing he can no longer give up.

Algernon Moncrieff

A young man of appetite and excuses, who invented a permanently ailing friend named Bunbury to escape every obligation.

Gwendolen Fairfax

A London lady of absolute conviction, who has decided that she can only love a man named Ernest.

Cecily Cardew

Eighteen, and already engaged - in her diary - to a man she has never met.

Lady Bracknell

A formidable lady who turns a proposal of marriage into a cross-examination, where birth and income always come before feeling.

Miss Prism

Cecily's governess and a teacher of morals, who has spent twenty-eight years forgetting what she once put into a handbag instead of her manuscript.

Canon Chasuble

The elderly parish rector, ready at any hour for a christening or a wedding, and unaccountably talkative in the presence of Miss Prism.