When “The Importance of Being Earnest,” by Oscar Wilde, opened, on February 14, 1895, in London, the date was well chosen. It was the Victorians, after all, who decisively turned the feast of St. Valentine into a mass commercial celebration, with would-be lovers concealing their identities behind an anonymous exchange of greeting cards and other tokens of desire. “Earnest,” the fourth drawing-room comedy that Wilde had produced within three years, centered on the courtship of two young women, Gwendolen Fairfax and Cecily Cardew, by two young men, Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff. Both suitors repeatedly resort to subterfuge in order to maintain double lives in which the satisfactions of social respectability are counterbalanced by the pursuit of pleasure and personal freedom. The play, which Wilde gave a paradoxical subtitle, “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People,” harnessed Shakespearean conventions of mistaken identity and romantic disguise—at different moments, each man pretends to be named Ernest. The skittering plot is anchored by Lady Bracknell, the mother of Gwendolen and the aunt of Algernon. An overbearing elder who often thwarts the lovers’ intentions, she is the voice of Victorian probity in Wilde’s deranged scenario.

This canonical part has been played by some of the foremost women of the British stage, among them Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, and Edith Evans, who, in Anthony Asquith’s 1952 film adaptation, put a delightfully querulous spin on Lady Bracknell’s most indelible lines. (“To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”) Late this summer, it was announced that the role would be tackled in a new West End production by another well-known British performer: Stephen Fry, the actor, comic, novelist, memoirist, radio presenter, television personality, gay-rights advocate, mental-health campaigner, and, as of earlier this year, Knight Bachelor. Now sixty-eight, Fry has been a household name in Britain for four decades, though it might be more accurate to call him a household voice—his resonant baritone being instantly recognizable everywhere from “Harry Potter” audiobooks to commercials for Sainsbury’s supermarkets. When, this fall, he appeared in a celebrity version of the hit reality show “The Traitors,” his fellow-participants referred to him, earnestly, as “national treasure Stephen Fry.”

In early September, the cast of “Earnest” was in the production’s rehearsal space, on Gray’s Inn Road in central London, practicing a scene in which Lady Bracknell directs a flurry of questions to Jack—or Ernest, the false name he uses in town. A twitchily silly Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, playing Jack, stood stage left while Fry sat stage right, a tea table at his elbow. Fry was dressed in black jeans and a fleece top, and he had at his waist a small bag that was standing in for Lady Bracknell’s reticule. Taking a notebook out of it, Fry delivered his lines: “I feel bound to tell you that you are not down on my list of eligible young men, although I have the same list as the dear Duchess of Bolton has. We work together, in fact.” Lady Bracknell scans a checklist. Does Jack smoke? He does. “I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind.”

The inquisition is an exercise in absurdity, grounded in the very rational, if unspoken, imperative that Gwendolen should marry wealth. After delivering one of Lady Bracknell’s more ridiculous apothegms—“I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing. Which do you know?”—Fry glowed with satisfaction when Stewart-Jarrett responded, “I know nothing.” Fry, in a register pitched only slightly higher than his natural speaking voice, said, “I am pleased to hear it. I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.” Lady Bracknell’s approval turns to horror, however, when she learns that Jack was a foundling who was abandoned in a train station in a carryall. The focus of her horror: “A handbag?” After this one-liner, Fry expertly unfurled one of the character’s more sidewinding sentences, with which Wilde parodied the verbosity, as well as the morality, of his age: “To be born, or at any rate bred, in a handbag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.”

During a break, Fry told me, “If that scene doesn’t get them going, you really have failed.” We were walking to have lunch nearby, on Lamb’s Conduit Street. Fry is six feet four, with a swift stride, and he traversed the streets as fluently as he had the language of “Earnest.” During the run-through, Fry had delivered the handbag ejaculation in a tremulous tone of disbelief, and I asked if he’d settled on that as his approach. “The trouble is, it’s a bit of a ‘To be, or not to be’ moment,” he observed, meaning that the line is one of the play’s most famous. “It varies every time I do it, and I think it should, for the moment at least. It tends to concretize later in the run. It’s a wanky, actory thing to say”—his voice grew plummier, finding the verity in exaggeration—“but you have to play the truth of the scene.”

In this production of “Earnest,” which opened to acclaim in the West End in late September, the sexual energy between the four young people isn’t confined to the ostensible heterosexual couplings of the text. Gwendolen and Cecily pant for each other; Algernon and Jack’s friendship is shaded with flirtation. This is a choice that seeks to make explicit a truth of the play: that Wilde’s confection about doubling and disguise is itself a doubled, disguised work. In “Earnest,” Wilde all but exposed his secret homosexual life, at least for those who had the ears to hear it. “The Duchess of Bolton,” for example, would have sounded to much of Wilde’s audience like the name of a generic aristocrat. But, for Wilde’s coterie of gay friends, the name surely brought to mind a Victorian precursor, Ernest Boulton, who, along with a companion, Frederick Park, had been arrested in London while wearing women’s clothing. They called themselves Stella and Fanny, respectively, and they were charged with the “abominable crime of buggery.” (In a triumphant twist, both were acquitted.)

“Of course, it’s all brilliantly deniable,” Max Webster, the production’s director, told me. He cited Jack-as-Ernest’s exclamation to Algernon of his feelings about Gwendolen: “She is the only girl I ever saw in my life that I would marry.” Webster explained, “It’s all about the stress. You can say, ‘the only girl I would ever marry,’ but if you say, ‘the only girl I would ever marry,’ it’s clearly gay. The whole thing has deniability, which on the one hand is a way of saving yourself, if that’s the level of risk in talking about your sexuality in public. But it also reflects Wilde’s belief—which is why he’s a proto-modernist—that meaning is various, that the self is constructed, that identity is a bubble that is constantly shimmering and transforming.”