It’s 6:15 p.m. on a Monday and the Deree Drama Club is gathered outside the Black Box Theater, getting ready for its regular rehearsal. “It’s time to go in guys,” shouts the director, and the production moves into the dark Box.

They kick off their shoes and start with their exercises, inhaling and exhaling always from the stomach. A couple of minutes later, they all take their up scripts and start reading their parts out loud. But this is no ordinary rehearsal. Along with the script, each actor has a piece fruit in his hand. The task is to learn how to talk and eat at the same time.

The Deree Drama Club decided in the spring of 2004 to perform “The Importance of Being Ernest” by Oscar Wilde, believed to be by many prominent directors one of the hardest plays to stage. But for this small group of amateur actors, harder is much harder than it seems.

Jack, Gwendolen, Algernon, Cecily, Lady Bracknell, Dr. Chasuble Miss Prism, Merriman and Lane. Through these characters, Oscar Wilde conveys how 19 th century people were so preoccupied with the most trivial issues, even when it came to important decisions like falling in love or getting married.

All the characters require an English accent and the proper ways of the Victorians. But did the cast have these qualities?

One of the most important difficulties that director Katerina Nikolopoulou had to face was the cast’s diversity of accents. “An audience expects a specific accent from the actors and actresses in this play, which they don’t all have right now,” she said.

The cast consisted of American, Dutch, British and Greek people that had to work on their accents and make them sound British. They had a professor from the linguistics department help them with their accents a little.

But how easy is it for an American accent to be transformed into a British one? “I have gone from changing my voice and talking with a British accent to changing my emotion in every line, and that is really very hard for me,” said Tasos Mikroulis, the Deree student who played the part of Jack, otherwise known as Ernest, the lead role in the play.

Body language is another very difficult part of this production, since all the actors have to adopt the Victorian style of walking, sitting and even eating. A contemporary “cast can’t identify with that specific period of time and that makes it difficult for them to adopt the Victorian body language and understand why people in that period moved the way they did,” explained Ms. Nikolopoulou.

The cast had to eat and speak simultaneously while on stage, since food was a very important part of the aristocratic culture of Victorian times, and consequently important in this play. As they rehearsed, biting into their apple and reading their script, the actors choked out pieces of fruit, then took another bite and started reading again.

In order to combat the body language difficulties, all the actors had to research their character and the period, all the way down to how they cut meat in Victorian times. Their weekend assignments included renting movies such as “Sense and Sensibility” and “The Age of Innocence” so that they could see in detail how they should behave.

When it came to costume designs and sets, the actors said they found it difficult to imagine how the director would recreate this 19 th century atmosphere. Actor Adonis Voutsinos, who played the romantic priest Dr Chasuble in the play, said the sets for the play match the complex costumes of the period. “That was the most difficult thing in this production I think,” he added.

The actors kept journals in which they wrote down all the details that constituted their characters. The details ranged from their favorite object to their character’s darkest secret.