On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage WILDE' BY STEFAN KANFER ON JANUARY 3, 1895, the Theater Royal at the Haymarket rocked with laughter and applause. It was the opening night of Oscar Wilde's newest work. An Ideal Husband....
...Will Sir Robertagree to publicly endorse her scheme for a canal in Argentina, even though he knows it to be a swindle...
...Certainly there would be no objections from Goring's family...
...Sasha comes to the door and refuses her...
...An Ideal Husband is very much a piece with Lady Windermere s Fan, A Woman of No Importance and The Importance of Being Earnest...
...Found guilty, Wilde went to prison and then into exile in France...
...She was always an adventuress with her eye on the main chance...
...Cheveley, and she still nourishes a passion for the lifelong bachelor...
...Around these august personages flows the customary Wildean pageant of servants, savants, stuffed shirts, and their ladies, allowing for a stream of epigrams: "Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern...
...The end arrived in November 1910, in the tiny Astapovo railroad station where Tolstoy's physical and mental health finally, fatally broke down...
...In this clash Sonya could only lose...
...He confides in Goring and pleads for advice, but the Lord seems more interested in spouting apothegms than in helping to solve conundrums...
...Still, I doubt that it could have been superior to the one at the Ethel Barrymore...
...Andrey (Jud Meyers), Tatiana (Jennifer Harmon) and Sergey (Reno Roop) proved to be little more than devices for filling out an overly long evening, and the rest of the 15-member cast—including a photo-journalist, a churchman, a railroad employee, sycophants, and medical attendants—projected sincerity without authenticity...
...which included a large and mobile railway car, and a foreboding provincial outpost closing around the family like a coffin...
...audiences turned nasty, and An Ideal Husband was taken off" the boards...
...I have seen footage of those last days: in it Sonya and one of her sons beg to enter the unprepossessing little shack w here Tolstoy has been taken to die...
...The payoff granted him wealth that he parlayed into social position, political power and an advantageous marriage to the most beautiful andmoralistic woman in town (Madeleine Potter...
...In the Saturday Review a writer named George Bernard Shaw scoffed at the scoffers...
...Your disposition in recent years," it complained, "has become more and more irritable, despotic and lacking in self-control...
...I never reply to my critics...
...She is 71, only a little younger than the Countess was in 1910, and the famous vocal quaver projected an appropriate mix of resolve and anguish...
...Yet in one significant way it departs from the Wilde canon...
...In one of the grand ironies of the age, Tolstoy was slipping away just as the notion of privacy was being banished in Russia and everywhere else...
...The union had reached its nadir: There was "an absolutely contrary understanding of the meaning and purpose of life...
...Philanthropy is the refuge of people who wish to annoy their fellow creatures...
...alienated from all he once held dear, scurrying to an appointment with death across a blasted heath...
...They were to provide a screen between Sonya, the couple's other children, the Russian Orthodox Church that had excommunicated him for daring to depart from its dogmas, and, of course, the inquisitive, prurient public...
...Perhaps, suggests the wicked schemer, Sir Robert's past might be forgotten if Lord Goring were to become part of her future...
...But not all...
...As Wilde might have put it, who could ask for anything less...
...Several months after the opening, the Marquis of Queensbury charged that his son, Bosie, had been seduced by the playwright...
...the pleaders sadly retreat into history...
...I am the only person in London who cannot sit down and write an Oscar Wilde play at will...
...In the sparkling production at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, that aristocrat amounts to a dandified Greek chorus, commenting on society and its moral dilemmas...
...Or will he remain ethically rigorous—and place himself on the road to exposure and ruin...
...Oscar unwisely decided to sue for libel in open court...
...But with Sonya playwright Leon Katz made a wrong-headed attempt, and the Phoenix Theater Company's production in Purchase...
...Although Oscar was grateful for this endorsement, he was quite capable of defending himself...
...He plays with everything: with philosophy, with drama, w ith actors and audience, with the whole theater...
...He goes for walks, rides his horse, writes a little, goes wherever he pleases, does absolutely nothing for the family...
...as usual, most critics labeled it "serious nonsense...
...The writer, then 82, had been on the run from his home and his 48-year marriage to Sonya, nee Behrs...
...As the resident wit of An Ideal Husband, Lord Goring (Martin Shaw) serves the purpose...
...His was an excruciatingly miserable family, and the causes of its distress were hardly unique...
...As Richard Ellmann observes in his biography, "The play's charm derives not from its exposure of hypocrisy, but from the gradual expansion of tenderness...
...he told an interviewer...
...The remaining siblings...
...He had lately sent her a message spelling out the reasons for his vexed spirit...
...The visible star of the show was Campbell Band's remarkably fluid set...
...Here people not only act well, they also talk well...
...the Tolstoyan disciple who once told the master that if he had a wife like Sonya he would shoot himself, and Tolstoy's youngest daughter Sasha, who had loathed her mother from childhood...
...He noted their claim "that such epigrams can be turned out by the score by anyone light-minded enough to condescend to such frivolity...
...Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere's Fan, Algernon and Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest are all mouthpieces for Oscar's views on life and art...
...Among those in the railway car were Vladimir Grigorievich Chertkov...
...as usual, it became an overnight sensation...
...Instead, they were projections of old arguments and fragments of the diary—exposition substituting for dramatic incident...
...Russia's greatest writer enjoyed a vast support system of readers, celebrities and admirers who accepted his every word as gospel—including the notion that Countess Tolstoy was a villainess of the deepest dye...
...the year before his death...
...That kindness was not to be repaid...
...he would be happy to see the aging lad married to anyone, anywhere, any time...
...The kindness of the playwright is more evident here than in the other plays...
...Fame...
...But horror of horrors, the newly widowed woman has just returned to London...
...Of the children, Sasha (Miriam Healy-Louie) came off best simply because she had the only one-on-one scene with her mother...
...Chief among the problems is the long-hidden fact that Sir Robert Chiltern (David Yelland) sold a state secret early in his career...
...As the Earl and his Lady, Denison and Dulcie Gray (husband and wife in real life) are especially admirable, as is Dennis Holmes as a long-suffering servant, and Hasted as the feisti-est young woman in the Wilde canon...
...Now an exemplar of incorruptibility and responsibility, he is on track to become Prime Minister...
...But 1 think some day I will give a general answer in the form of a lecture, which 1 shall call' Straight Talk to Old Men.'" When the playwright was not carrying on like that, his characters were...
...The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on...
...As usual, the play was full of the author's patented social comment and comic paradox...
...now that chance isblackmail...
...New York, fell several versts short of its goal...
...The fact that his plays, though apparently lucrative, remain unique under these circumstances, says much for the self-denial of our scribes...
...According to contemporary accounts, the production at the Theater Royal was resplendent...
...I have too much time...
...Only one person knows of his peccadillo, Mrs...
...that unquenchable thirst for fame to which he has sacrificed everything...
...When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers...
...The resultant publicity was catastrophic...
...The play was not performed again in his lifetime (it was not even published until 1899...
...She had the backing of a middle-aged daughter and two sons...
...Shaw concluded by calling Wilde "our only thorough playwright...
...Designer Carl Toms gives the impression that Whistler has recently stopped by to do the costumes and sets, and Peter Hall's meticulous direction makes every line seem freshly minted...
...In fact, they came from the all too familiar mixture of self-delusion, egotism, sexual incompatibility and, in time, relatives viciously scrambling over an estate...
...Excluding Tolstoy from a play about his finale was like presenting Lear without the King, an exercise in futility that was Russian only in its perversity...
...The same difficulty occurred with Chertkov (Philip Baker Hall), who was essentially a resume in place of a man...
...In its mockery of ambition and sham...
...Sonya entered continuing objections to his public sainthood and her private misery: "He pushes everything off onto me, everything, without exception...
...The plaintiff certainly had a point, but in truth the two had been at war for decades...
...The other star, the one who might have saved the night, was never seen: Leo Nikolae-vich, alternately Christlike and satanic...
...Quite a domestic tragedy, and one that seems born for the stage...
...While Chiltern twists slowly in the wind, various subplots develop...
...ONE OF TOLSTOY'S most famous, and most debatable, observations comes at the beginning of Anna Kareni-na:"All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way...
...Cheve-ley (Anna Carteret) of Vienna...
...Yet her speeches had nothing to do with the matter at hand...
...In Goring's youth, it is revealed, he was engaged to Mrs...
...In her diary...
...Indeed, his father, the charming and indulgent Earl of Caversham (Michael Denison) regards his son as a something of a wastrel...
...Lots of people act well," Oscar once observed, "but few people talk well, which shows that talking is the more difficult of the two, and much the finer thing also...
...The Chil-terns, too, rediscover their bond...
...His cast is nearly flawless...
...Goring and Sir Robert's sister Mabel (Victoria Hasted)—whom he will eventually marry—"are witty and loving, and the affectionate relations of Goring and his father become an object lesson...
...Apparently, said Shaw...
...For me, property is a sin, for you an essential condition of life...
...Being educated puts one almost on a level with the commercial classes...
...one is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly...
...The Pathe Newsreel camera had made its appearance in all the major capitals in Europe, and now it invaded the provinces...
...As Sonya, Julie Harris brought a gnarled intelligence to the role...
...Artfully padded out to resemble Wilde, Shaw is an expert drawing room comedian, and those who surround him are skilled in the arts of satire and irony...
Vol. 79 • July 1996 • No. 4
