Oscar
Wilde: Savage Paradox
Patricia
Flanagan Behrendt
[This article was written for the programme of the 2007 production of The Importance of
being Earnest at the Abbey Theatre,
At
the height of Oscar Wilde’s career in 1895, the same fickle London audience
that applauded the theatrical brilliance of his comedies of manners–most
notably The Importance of Being Earnest–turned its ferocious attention to the
epic spectacle of his personal and rather thespic
fall from grace in the witness box of a sobering British court of law. A
literary success in multiple genres with diverse audiences, Wilde was less than
half a century old, a notorious man in notorious times, when his two-year
prison term at hard labor, as a result of charges of homosexuality, ended. While
his death in exile in
In
fact, the language of Wilde’s plays resonates with the same paradoxes,
inconsistencies, incongruities, contradictions, and reversals as his biography.
Earnest alone, like the chapters of
Wilde’s life, is so fraught with dizzying and manipulative wit that, finally,
it approaches a level of hilarity and excitation that suddenly reveal its
tragic opposite. For a brief moment in the midst of the plays action, we are
exhausted by it. Suddenly, that gaping maw of paradoxes, where comic and tragic
are one, looms before us in the play’s artificiality. We glimpse the patent
cruelty in artifice which both delights and conceals. Earnest resonates with the paradoxes and
contraries of Wilde’s life–the torturous shifting of roles from husband to
homosexual lover; from loving father to pursuer of ‘dilly boys’; and from artist to criminal according to the laws of his
time. His life and his play
were all about the never-ending charade that informs the surface
details of life’s action.
In
1895, drama critic William Archer was on to Wilde when he wrote that Earnest was ‘delightful to see,’ sending
‘wave after wave of laughter curling and foaming around the theatre.’ But he
concluded that as a text ‘it is delusive . . . it is intangible . . . it eludes
your grasp!’ Wilde, however, had arrived at the one medium that was, by its
very artifice, the perfect vehicle for illusive language and multi layered
meanings. Academic writing often repeats the notion that Wilde finally turned
to the theatre as his venue both to criticize society and to rise within it.
But in reality, he chose the medium that strives to perfect three-dimensional
illusion through artificial means, through actors and images that were never
intended to be what they seem but only to appear to be what they seem. The
theatre lives, enigmatically, as Wilde lived. He had found the spiritual home
that best embodied his own inscrutable reference to art as ‘the telling of
beautiful, untrue things.’
In the case of Wilde’s plays, performance is
everything. Some are happiest interpreting the text alone; that is to say,
where the objects of study remain static on the page rather than slippery on
the stage. Wilde’s early critics found great faults with the texts of his
plays. They labeled the plots derivative, ‘carpentered successions of outré and
improbable events’; the ideas simple-minded, as ‘devoid of purpose as a paper
balloon’; the characters shallow, lazy, ‘cynical machines for the utterance of
paradox and epigram’; the language ‘vulgarized to the level of a punster.’ In
fact one naively prophetic critic suggested that, as a playwright, Wilde ought
to choose ‘between
On
the basis of the text alone, Wilde’s critics could not explain Earnest’s success in performance. And
yet, the play is all about performance. With each performance, the play’s
truths are revealed to varying members of the audience according to his or her
personal capacity–or desire–to receive them. Theatre does what no other medium
does: it specializes in rehearsal and performance techniques that create
incomplete and temporary transformations where, for example, people become
actors in order to transform into other people, or into gods, or into animals,
or into demons, and so on. In performance, performers lose and regain their
psychic and physical balance over and over again. All of which may be played
out in a luxurious setting–amidst, for example, a rococo decorative effusion like that called
for in An Ideal Husband–all made, in
reality, of cheap paste and corduroy.
The effect of Earnest in
performance is less a function of the text than it is a function of the serious
insights, often unspoken but known, about the action life of the play that
emerge i
rehearsal. No matter how light and frothy the performance, one cannot
escape the perception that Wilde is deadly serious about ‘beautiful, untrue
things.’
Wilde’s
complex personal life of passion and deception, at first exhilarating and, then,
exhausting in real life, appears in the plays in his savage explorations of the
conventions of artifice. As critics have often remarked, all the voices in the
plays are Wilde’s. It is conceivable that the act of writing the plays brought
him closer to himself than he had ever been. In a momentary psychic slip, he
confused audience approval of the plays with the kind of personal approval that
subsequently led him to speak in evasive epigrams in a court of law. The result
was calamitous; for by doing so, Wilde seemed to validate his own aphoristic
remark that ‘nothing survives being thought of.’
·
Patricia
Flanagan Behrendt was
until her retirement Associate Professor of Theatre Studies at the University
of Nebraska-Lincoln, and is author of Oscar
Wilde, Eros and Aesthetics and numerous interdisciplinary articles on drama
and pedagogy. She is now an Associate
Editor of THE OSCHOLARS.
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