Wilde and Domestic
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage WILDE AND DOMESTIC By Stefan Kanfer If with the literate I am Impelled to try an epigram I never seek to take the credit We all assume that Oscar said it. Dorothy Parker's...
...His distraught mother and alcoholic brother, however, entreated him to stay and fight it out...
...Despite Wilde's amusing replies on the witness stand (Carson: "Have you ever adored a young man madly...
...Algernon Swinburne, himself a kinky Victorian, wrote an epitaph with a double entendre worthy of his subject: When Oscar came to join his God, Not earth to earth, but sod to sod, It was for sinners such as this Hell was created bottomless...
...Whenever someone compiles an anthology of Victorian wit, Oscar Wilde is odds-on to be the most quoted...
...My dear, I'm not selling...
...Enter Bosie (Tom Hollander...
...Moreover, in the title role Neeson is perversely miscast, a footballer attempting to play a voluptuary...
...Friends begged him to take a boat across the Channel, where the French had proved more tolerant toward the peccadilloes of the rich and famous...
...The problem is that we have been here before, in scores of television dramas and feature films...
...If he did he would cease to be an artist...
...The same holds true for the current film, Wilde, which presents the author caught in a trap of his own devising...
...Yet the play never comes to life...
...He brought forth witness after witness to testify about Wilde's "gross indecencies...
...She has returned in a vehicle too rickety for her considerable talents, even though Foxworth makes a plausible target for the author's hostilities, and so does the versatile Linney...
...The fact is, though, that he denied his homosexuality in court, and kept up the mask of "respectability" for decades...
...For too long Jane Alexander has been absent from the stage, lobbying honorably for the National Endowment for the Arts...
...Gus (Robert Foxworth) is a middleaged political pundit, much taken with himself and his views of the world...
...On another, lower plane he was a habitué of London's hidden world of pederasty...
...He rose, and he put down The Yellow Book, He staggered—and, terrible-eyed, He brushed by the palms on the staircase And was helped to a hansom outside...
...The Marquess' lawyer, Edward Carson, was a brilliant and ruthless barrister unused to losing...
...And, of course, they are correct...
...Oscar needed no help with the misspelling...
...Of the three presentations of Wilde currently on view, The Judas Kiss is the weakest...
...Look, says Hare's unsubtle editorial, the straights can do it any time and anywhere, but let a gay couple try it and the sky falls...
...Anybody can make history...
...Bosie added his own meaching voice, and Oscar agreed...
...Would that I could say the same for the play...
...He is not materially aided by Hollander, whose acting is confined to pouts...
...The government had no taste for seeing one of England's greatest authors behind bars...
...His wife, Honor (no "u" in her name, the title uses the British spelling to make an ironic comment on fidelity), is a writer who shelved her career in favor of her husband's...
...he knew what Bosie's father meant, and unwisely decided to sue for libel...
...The most dramatic figure of fin de siècle London is written as if wit and personality had been left behind in the courtroom, replaced by squabbles and anachronisms like "Let's get our priorities straight...
...John Betjeman's verse depicts the scene as a Cockney policeman arrives...
...Director Richard Eyre keeps things moving crisply and Bob Crowley's costumes nicely evoke the period...
...As Wilde observed, you can have too much of a good thing, and Linney's skirt is shorter than need be...
...But this was not to be...
...She also raised their daughter, Sophie (Enid Graham), now a young adult...
...Nothing is impossible in Russia but reform...
...He was unmourned in the England that had made him a celebrity and a pariah...
...Into the lives of this long-wed couple comes Claudia (Laura Linney), an ambitious journalist with long hair and an abbreviated hemline...
...Ross urges him to run but knows that Oscar will stay to suffer the final humiliation...
...Had he chosen exile, Wilde might well have lasted out the storm and returned a decade later...
...The fact is that Wilde did not die of a broken heart but of tertiary syphilis...
...Instead we see two people talking about banalities...
...Wilde: "I have never given adoration to anybody but myself"), the jury brought in a verdict of guilty and the writer was sentenced to two years hard labor in Reading Gaol...
...The latest instance is Honour, the story of a dissolving marriage...
...At the very opening of The Judas Kiss, a male and female servant (Alex Walkinshaw and Stina Nielsen) disport nude in the percales...
...The latter half must remain agnostic until something more persuasive comes along...
...The fact is that many a heterosexual Briton was destroyed by bedroom scandal before and after Wilde...
...Name the category and Oscar is there: The cynical epigram: "The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer...
...Yet that semidocumentary is honest enough to show that Oscar was not only the object of social pressure and a ravening press, he was also a victim of hubris...
...Tell me about Edmund Wilson," she entreats him...
...It takes a great man to write it...
...It is as an icon that Wilde appears in the Off-Broadway production, Gross Indecencies...
...Delighted to play Pygmalion to her Galatea, the smitten Gus returns home to present Honor with the news: He is trading in his old love fora 1998 model...
...truth is often a stranger to political causes...
...Perhaps, as an old man, he might even have been knighted...
...On one plane he was a Victorian haute bourgeois, married with two children, playwright of An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, creator of the provocative novel Portrait of Dorian Gray, composer of light verse and children's books, bon vivant famous for his sparkling table talk ("I put my talent into my work and my genius into my conversation...
...Claudia has two compelling attributes, her beauty and her ignorance...
...Theoretically there should be sparks, or at least embers, of an affair that rocked England...
...The esthete's rationale: "No great artist ever sees things as they really are...
...One half the world does not believe in God, and the other half does not believe in me...
...Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation...
...Mr...
...A longhair in every sense of the word, the Irishman had been living parallel lives throughout the 1880s...
...Oscar's mildly acerbic replies, composed by playwright David Hare, are unmemorable and Bosie's sarcastic observation, "Very funny," is an editorial comment on the entire drama...
...Only he could have fashioned so peculiar a life, or acted out such a melodramatic finale...
...Their boss comes in and issues a mild reprimand...
...Having made itself felt on the campus and in the workplace, feminism has invaded Broadway...
...London bobbies deliberately dawdled on their way to Wilde's room hoping that he might, even at this late date, flee...
...It is sad," Oscar once lamented...
...Wilde could have escaped his fate at any time by dropping the lawsuit or using his passport...
...Dorothy Parker's assumption has been valid for more than 100 years...
...There is no question that Oscar suffered for The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name in the 1890s (and will not stop shouting a century later...
...The rest of the play consists of Gus being told off by his wife, and then by Sophie...
...As the couple's emotionally stunted daughter, Graham seems to have wandered in from a production down the street...
...And above all, the abrupt reversal: "A man cannot be too careful in his choice of enemies...
...she speaks in the staccato, self-interrupting manner of a David Mamet character...
...The Cold War—I don't get it...
...That particular joke was written by Raymond Chandler more than 50 years ago...
...The international putdown: "The youth of America is their oldest tradition...
...The man (read villain) is a strutting ego manipulated by a predatory blonde...
...Worse still, Hare feels it necessary to punch home the notion of sexual hypocrisy...
...After two years in jail and three years of melancholia and illness, Wilde died at the age of 46...
...But his story is more complex than his devotees would have us believe...
...And I'm shaky on Nietzsche...
...But never mind...
...After much tergiversation the case came to court...
...Woilde, we'ave come for tew take yew Where felons and criminals dwell: We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly For this is the Cadogan Hotel...
...In the latest incarnation, The Judas Kiss, at the Broadhurst Theater, Oscar (Liam Neeson) is purely an object of pathos, his creative life finished...
...It is inevitable that in our epoch of special pleading things would go into reverse, and that Oscar would be turned into a gay saint...
...With him at the Cadogan is Robert Ross (Peter Capaldi), no longer a lover but still a loyal friend...
...There he carried on a long affair with "Bosie" Douglas, son of the Marquess of Queensberry, and dallied with a parade of young male prostitutes...
...Director Gerald Gutierrez has made much of little, aided by Derek McLane's impressive domestic set, and Jane Greenwood's muted costumes—muted, that is, except for one item...
...Gus doesn't give her a second look—he is too busy with the first...
...The women whom he leaves (read heroines) are lovely, innocent and deeply afflicted by his actions...
...It was like tying the knots in his own noose...
...Their graphic testimonies doomed Oscar, who claimed to have known these youths as friends rather than lovers...
...Playwright Joanna MurraySmith is capable of an occasional bright line: "What is it about facing death that makes a man turn to a tanning salon...
...The rest of the cast does well with the little that has been handed them...
...One epochal February evening in 1895 the Marquess, a choleric and often irrational figure, left a note at Wilde's club accusing the writer of being a "somdomite" (sic...
...The social aperçu: "Most people are other people...
...He is self-indulgent, they point out, deluded by sex, a superannuated swinger...
...But she is also responsible for too many exchanges like the one between Claudia and Honor: "I'm not sure I'm buying that...
...As the world knows, this last aphorism was disproved by Oscar himself...
Vol. 81 • May 1998 • No. 6
