Reflections on Oscar Wilde

“This gross pillory they have put me in.”

Oscar Wilde

Alastair Whatley of the Original Theatre Company entertains with a recreation of Micheál Mac Liammóir’s 1960 one man play reading the writings of Oscar Wilde. There are excerpts from his plays leading up to the writings after his downfall and incarceration with hard labour in Reading Jail.

There are those classic and witty Wildean lines, “Work being the curse of the drinking classes,” and “I have nothing to declare but my genius,” all familiar but still bringing a smile and a flavour of the great wit that we lost far too early. Alastair Whatley doesn’t look like Wilde, nor does his English accent sound like him but he does capture the spirit of his great intelligence.

It is all the more atmospheric for being in the area that Wilde himself frequented, where Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas’s father, the Marquis of Queensbury planned to throw the basket of rotten vegetables at Wilde during the first night of The Importance of Being Earnest at the now demolished St James’s Theatre, in King Street. After being turned away at the theatre, Queensbury left a visiting card at Wilde’s Club, the Albermarle, with a manservant, to Oscar Wilde “posing somdomite”, except Queensbury spelt sodomite wrongly.

What isn’t in this play because Wilde didn’t write about it, is that there had been rumours that Lord Alfred Douglas’s elder brother, Francis Viscount Drumlanrig, who died in 1894 in a suspicious hunting accident had been having a homosexual affair with Lord Rosebery the Prime Minister and that Francis had committed suicide. So the avenging Lord Queensbury was defending another son from homosexual disgrace.

It was Bosie who goaded Wilde into prosecuting Queensbury with the libel suit which brought his downfall. Both the Albermarle Club and the location of the St James Theatre are very close to Jermyn Street Theatre.

I appreciated the long excerpt from De Profundis where Wilde reflects on his relationship with Bosie and of course the sad circumstances of Wilde’s death in France. However, I feel I learnt too little that was new about Wilde and that maybe reviving this 65 year old play which would have been sensational about “the love that dare not speak its name” in 1960s Ireland does not do enough. I was thinking about Davis Hare’s The Judas Kiss as doing more.