Earnest the musical? Earnest the sequel? Don't laugh...

'The Importance of Being Earnest' - released as a new film this week - may be very funny, but it's still easy to do it badly. Mark Bostridge looks back over the play's chequered history

London, Valentine's Day 1895. A bitter cold spell had produced numerous reports of people freezing to death, and those making their way that evening to St James's Theatre battled against a heavy snow-storm. Inside the theatre the atmosphere was "electric". At 8.40 – ten minutes late – the curtain rose on Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. This "Trivial Comedy for Serious People" simultaneously mocked and celebrated the world of its fashionable audience, yet there could be no doubt as to the warmth of the play's reception. Allan Aynesworth, the first Algernon, never remembered a greater triumph than that first night. "The audience rose in their seats and cheered and cheered again."

But the seeds of Wilde's own destruction had already been sown. On opening night the Marquess of Queensbury stalked Wilde for three hours, before leaving an insulting bouquet of vegetables at the stage door instead of the public denunciation he had planned. Within three months, with Wilde's conviction for homosexual offences imminent, The Importance of Being Earnest was taken off (his name had been removed from the programme as soon as the scandal erupted). It would not be performed again in London in his lifetime.

When the play did return in triumph to the West End in 1902, two years after Wilde's death, his name was still absent from the playbills and programmes. There would be other successful revivals before the First World War, but not until 1913 was the playwright's name reinstated. Since then productions of The Importance of Earnest have proliferated, on stage, screen (the first, a 1932 German film) and television. It is still the most popular of all Wilde's plays, perhaps the most famous comedy in the English language, despite the fact that early critics like Shaw, who found it "mechanically heartless", and H G Wells, who thought the baby-in-the-hand-bag scenario "a little far-fetched", seemed determined to burst Wilde's "delicate bubble of fancy", and despite the way in which its irreverent spirit eludes precise definition.

For years The Importance of Being Earnest has also resisted becoming an object of individual experiment. Even something as tame as the 1923 modern dress production, in which Cecily became a flapper and Lady Bracknell's costumes were based on fashions introduced by Queen Mary (in the 1970s a Canadian actor actually played Bracknell as a transvestite reincarnation of the Queen), was frowned upon, and there's been no subsequent attempt to modernise the play. Nicholas Hytner's 1993 staging exploited one of the drama's suggested undercurrents – is "earnest" a code word for homosexual via "uraniste"? – when Jack and Algy first greeted each other with a mouth-to-mouth kiss, but has found few imitators. It remains to be seen whether Oliver Parker's new film version, with its star cast and sumptuous locations, will find favour, though its tinkering with the text and widespread visual metaphors, a hot-air balloon and tattoo parlour included, make it the most ambitious attempt yet to adapt Earnest to the demands of another medium.

Parker, who himself played Jack in a Theatr Clywd production more than a decade ago and scored a big hit a few years ago with his film of An Ideal Husband, is unapologetic about the need for these changes. "I know that there's going to be a raft of purists who love the play, but I have tried to develop a style true to the original while also providing a new take on it for this generation." The dialogue is "nearly all Wilde's", though Parker has interpolated "about 20 lines" of his own, and has also borrowed the so-called "Gribsby" scene from the discarded fourth act in which Algy, masquerading as Earnest at Jack's country home, is pursued for debt.

Overshadowing any new film of Earnest is bound to be the memory of Anthony Asquith's 1952 screen adaptation, though Asquith did little more than photograph the play in the choicest Technicolor. (This film is framed as a theatrical experience with a couple entering a theatre-box at the beginning and scrutinising their programmes). Asquith had the advantage of a superb cast: Michael Redgrave, Margaret Rutherford, Dorothy Tutin and, of course, Edith Evans, for many the definitive Lady Bracknell, who gave the famous line, "A hand-bag?", a ringing delivery, rising three octaves on a single syllable. Evans grew to hate her identification with the part. "I've played her everywhere except on ice and under water", she protested. Parker's Bracknell is Judi Dench who portrays her as less of a fire-breathing dragon, in keeping with Parker's emphasis on a gentler, more compassionate interpretation. It may also be more in line with Wilde's intentions. The original Bracknell, Rose Leclercq, who'd made her name playing horsey duchesses, was, as the reviews make clear, never intended as a star turn.

W H Auden once commented on the "pure verbal opera" of Earnest's dialogue, while others have compared the play's formality to that of a dance. It's hardly surprising then that The Importance of Being Earnest, according to Robert Tanitch, author of a recent study, has been adapted at least eight times as a musical, though never with conspicuous success. The earliest musical was a 1927 American version entitled Oh Earnest. The libretto of a 1957 musical adaptation, Half in Earnest, deposited in the British Library, is scarcely more encouraging. The curtain rises on Algy strumming away at the piano, singing "I can play 'Chopsticks', Lane". Other songs include – almost predictably – "A Bunburying I Must Go".

The Importance of Being Earnest has had a busy after-life as one might expect of a cultural icon. It's the play-within-a play in Stoppard's Travesties, it clearly influences Edward Bond's black comedy country-house play, The Sea, while Mark Ravenhill of Shopping and Fucking fame offers a bit of prequel in Handbag in which we meet "Augusta", 30 years before she enters Wilde's play as Lady Bracknell (an idea unconsciously imitated in a flashback in Parker's film where the young Bracknell is glimpsed as a striving parvenu).

But most peculiar of all is Thomas Thom's play Without Apologies, which had a brief run off-Broadway in the late Eighties. Set in Camden Town in the Thirties, it reveals Algy to have become a writer of obituaries while his wife Gwendolen keeps chickens. Perhaps the reviewer in the New York Times thought that this was just too depressing a fate for Wilde's man-about-town and his brother's former fiancée. "It would have been no loss at all," he wrote tersely, "if Without Apologies had been left in a hand-bag in a cloakroom at Victoria Station."

'The Importance of Being Earnest' (U) is released on Friday