THE CRITIC AS CRITIC I : OSCAR WILDE

A Portfolio of Theatre and Book Reviews

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No 52 : AUGUST 2010

With increasing coverage of books that reflect other aspects of the fin de siècle, this page has been split into two with effect from August 2010. THE CRITIC AS CRITIC I covers Oscar Wilde; THE CRITIC AS CRITIC II the other books that have come to our attention. We are grateful for the co-operation of the publishers.

Shaw reviews appear in Shavings; all other theatre reviews in . Exhibition reviews and reviews of books relating to the visual arts now appear in our journal VISIONS which is reached by clicking its symbol

All authors whose books are reviewed are invited to respond. This page is edited by D.C. Rose.

v In an article for THE OSCHOLARS which she titled ‘Wilde on Tap’, Patricia Flanagan Behrendt, then our American Editor, set out an agenda for our theatre coverage that we will try to follow. This article can be found by clicking .

v For tables with links to all our reviews click

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Koenraad Claes on The Importance of being Earnest in Ghent
Jane Desmarais on Salomé
Kirby Joris on Le Procès d’Oscar Wilde
Aoife Leahy on Wilde in Dublin
John McRae on Teleny
Anna Orhanen on The Importance of being Earnest in London
Leonée Ormond on The Duchess of Padua
Ignacio Ramos Gay on Wilde in Paris
Frederick S. Roden on Reinventing Oscar
David Charles Rose on De Profundis

Review by Anna Orhanen (King’s College London)

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

Cochrane Theatre, London

On Saturday 12th of June 2010, I went to see a production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, directed by John Risebero and Ben Horslen, at the Cochrane Theatre, London. The production by Antic Disposition was first put on at Jermyn Street Theatre in West End three years ago; following a sold-out season in 2007, the show now returned to London for three nights only before setting off for a tour in France later this summer.

Antic Disposition was founded in 2005, and over the past five years the company’s repertoire has included classic plays such as Shakespeare’s Richard III and Much Ado About Nothing as well as an original musical version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

It is always a challenge to stage a play that is expected to offer the audience an evening of guaranteed amusement; although the ‘raw material’ of a play like Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is famously excellent, it comes with a particular pressure to be delivered in a fresh and original way. Antic Disposition did well in bringing Wilde’s play to life in a thoroughly entertaining way, much thanks to the sparkling on-stage chemistry between the actors. There is no doubt the audience was gripped from the very beginning of the first act, in which the two young gentlemen of the play, Algernon Moncrieff (brilliant James Russell) and Jack Worthing (Ashley Cook) compare their methods of leading double-lives. Jack has created a whimsical younger brother Earnest, into whose shoes he steps whenever in the London; in the country, he poses as much more serious and thoroughly respectable Jack Worthing, particularly for the sake of his young ward, Cecily. Algie, on the other hand, has a sickly imaginary friend, Bunbury, who provides him with an excuse to flee from tiring social occasions.

Both James Russell and Ashley Cook acted out their roles seamlessly. The unquestionable star of the evening, however, was James Pellow as Lady Bracknell. Pellow has played Dame in pantomime many times, and every last of his gestures, voice and movements was thoroughly convincing. (My companion remarked that in a way Pellow came across as the most feminine character on stage that evening!) Particularly the scene where Lady Bracknell cross-examines her potential son-in-law, Jack Worthing, evoked emphatic laughs and spontaneous applause amongst the audience.

Another wonderful performance was that of Peter Mair as the two butlers, Lane and Merriman. Through his careful avoidance of any vehemence and his minimalist gestures as Algernon’s Lane, and nothing-but minimalist coughs and facial expressions as Jack’s Merriman, Mair truly delivered two different people on the stage. The voices of Lane and Merrimen were in fact so different that I personally did not realise the two roles were done by the same man until in act three. Mair started his career in the 1960s and is experienced both as a role player and voice over artist.

The dialogue between Jack’s fiancé Gwendolyn (Anouke Brook) and Cecily (Jayne Dickinson) was eloquent, feisty and vibrant. Occasionally, however, I felt they did not necessarily succeed one-hundred-percent in conveying the all the deep ironic nuances underneath al the ‘feminine’ silliness of their characters; maybe more could have been extracted from the powerful position these two women hold in relation to their poor beaus – despite all the ‘Bunburying’ the gentlemen get up to.

Much to their merit, Risebero and Horslen had chosen to stick to the original setting of the play in upper class Victorian England. The stage design by Risebo was impressive, with a big empty frame in the middle of the stage, used as a door, window to the blossoming garden and a bookshelf in the three acts. One must also congratulate the costume supervisor, Sophie Howard, particularly on the costumes of Lady Bracknell: Lady Bracknell’s entrance in act two in her extremely flamboyant dress – on James Pellow’s well-built figure – made the audience break into heartfelt laughter.

While a century and a half between the life on the stage and that of the audience was retained through the staging and costume, the distance between the milieux of the characters and the audience was equally swept aside during the evening: Wilde’s witticisms and the playful dialogue seem to address the audiences now as much as ever. Remarks such as ‘the English education leads nowhere’ and ‘I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that’ kindled particularly wholehearted amusement in the audience and showed that some fundamental things – like jokes on the educational system or vegetarians – still apply.

In August, Antic Disposition will be performing the play at various open-air locations in southwest France, as a part of the Festival Shakespeare du Quercy (3-11 August 2010). (More information on the locations and the festival at: http://www.festivalshakespeare.org) As someone in whose heart Oscar Wilde holds a special place, I would say that this delightful production of ‘Earnest’ is guaranteed to deliver Wildean wit and humour to the audiences abroad in utmost style.

v Anna Orhanen is a Finnish Oscar Wilde scholar, currently working chiefly on Proust.

Review by David Charles Rose

DE PROFUNDIS

Oscar Wilde : De Profundis, adapted and performed by Christophe Truchi at the Ateliers d'Amphoux, Avignon 8th-31st July 2010. Seen 10th July.

While Oscar Wilde’s comedies remain as popular as ever with large audiences, his other writings, not intended for stage presentation, are being increasingly adapted for film, television and theatre. This allows one to receive Wilde’s thoughts mediated by directors and actors, giving the audience access to interpretations through selection and emphasis denied them as simple readers. The French have a taste for De Profundis. Michel Voletti gave us a De Profundis at the Aktéon Théâtre in Paris in the spring of 1997; Corin Redgrave’s version was at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in February 2009; Grégoire Couette-Jourdain directed Jean-Paul Audrain at the Déchargeurs, (March to May 2009, and again at the Théâtre Lucernaire in summer 2010); and Christophe Truchi’s De Profundis is the latest in this line. This was staged by Truchi in Paris in December 2009 (Théâtre du Marais) and reprised during the 2010 Avignon Festival in the Ateliers d'Amphoux, where the stone walls gave without further design the impression of Cell C.3.3.

The actor chose to give us a De Profundis that emphasised Wilde’s complete absorption even in these piteous circumstances with the nature of art and the rôle of the artist. This was the De Profundis that was Wilde’s artistic testament, less ‘from the depths’ and more ‘concerning profound matters’. Although the price to be paid for this was the sacrifice of the emotional charge that runs through the text, it served well to unscramble the diverse strands of apologia, essay, hate letter, love letter, that Wilde twisted to make his rope. For this reviewer, with the memory of Corin Redgrave’s De Profundis still fresh and, even fresher, Nasri Sayegh’s interior monologue that makes up Christian Merlhiot’s film Le Procès d'Oscar Wilde, Truchi touched a sympathetic chord. What was missing, as so often in fringe theatre, was any programme sheet that explained how Truchi had come to his conception, and which edition/translation he used.

Truchi made no attempt to impersonate Wilde, and kept his stagecraft to the minimum, privileging the apollonian over the dionysiac in his representation. This was, therefore, a thoughtful, intellectual presentation of Wildëan philosophy, that removed any necessity for much biographical knowledge. It is not the most obvious reading of De Profundis but one that clearly worked for this small theatre’s capacity audience. May one hope for a DVD ?

v D.C. Rose, editor of THE OSCHOLARS, is a former theatre critic for the Dublin radio station Anna Livia FM.

Review by Kirby Joris (Université catholique de Louvain)

Le Procès d’Oscar Wilde (2010):

Searching for the Right Angle to Adopt

Some films are riveting. Others are thought-provoking. Christian Merlhiot’s Le Procès d’Oscar Wilde (2010) is both, and more. Halfway between a documentary film and an experimental chronicle, it features one single actor, Nasri Sayegh, and captures an image of Oscar Wilde which is – paradoxically enough – simultaneously evanescent and enduring.

Taking place in what looks like a Mediterranean country, in a most modern seaside house far away from England or France, the setting of Le Procès d’Oscar Wilde could very well allude to Wilde’s shortened elopement to Italy a few months after his release from prison in 1897. Lord Alfred Douglas was the reason for this escape. He was also the reason why Oscar did not run away from three backfiring and excruciating trials in April 1895.

Based on the minutes of those trials, Merlhiot’s film owes a lot to the atmosphere it creates around its sole character. Everything seems to merge in order to favour a intimate and uncluttered style, with subdued lighting and muffled footsteps from the past as well as from the present. A subtle mix between space, place, thoughtfully chosen colours (blue, fawn, white), an ambient soundtrack and simple but carefully designed shots, Le Procès d’Oscar Wilde is like a ‘midsummer night’s dream’, both literally and figuratively.

The film could be a play. It is actually a ‘huis clos’ (‘In Camera’), in which a Lebanese translator endeavours to render the trials of Oscar Wilde from French into Arabic. Sitting at a desk with the horizon and all it may imply at his back, the writer embarks on a soliloquy, reviewing Oscar Wilde’s trials, a tape recorder being the only witness to his re-appropriation of the facts and the personalities involved, to his search for ‘le mot juste’. Accordingly the translator very soon moves on to become an impersonator in his own right, verbally embodying the various protagonists of the trials, first the lawyers, then the judge, and, ultimately, the defendant, in what stands for Oscar Wilde’s personal and powerful plea.

This may sound like schizophrenia, but this is not the case. It is, rather, the coalescence of voices from the past in a present which steadfastly aspires to explain, (re-)interpret and re-enact it. Le Procès d’Oscar Wilde is a search for the right angle and the right posture to adopt. It is both a very delicate close reading and a very intense ‘textual-verbal’ rendering of Wilde’s aura, brought together by the evocation of his trials and tribulations.

As such, the film could equally be a séance. The actor is a spokesman, entering into some kind of trance that allows him to vividly and breathtakingly conjure up the image of a harsh but subtle reality and the influence it keeps exerting over the present. By trying to do justice to the complexities of the past, Merlhiot’s film is much more than a mere minimalist, text-for-the-text’s-sake sequence of images and shots. Because it manages to convey both a sense of loss and of recovery, both the fatality and the beauty of life and art, it captivates the audience. Although the fourth wall is there, we genuinely feel part and parcel of the whole process. We are the eye of the camera, shooting close-ups in a necessarily sober, unadorned, enclosed space, implicitly reminiscent of a court.

Le Procès d’Oscar Wilde is an experiment in form and content, similar to a collage of various bits and pieces – disparate voices, gestures, attitudes – ultimately forming a coherent although eclectic whole, always subject, as a result, to renewed and personal interpretations and thoughts. As it is, the film ventures to understand and reconstruct Oscar’s soul, thus reminding us that Wilde’s trials were, above all, the framing up of a man more than of an artist.

Although spirit-like, Oscar Wilde’s physical absence in the film nonetheless delineates an all-encompassing presence. Everything revolves around him, for everything may be perceived as though his historical self was indeed poetically defending himself in front of a mesmerized present-day audience. Staging him like he might have staged himself, Merlhiot and Sayegh clear a path and leave it open, unbarred. Just like a séance may either turn non-believers into aficionado, devotees into non-believers or merely reinforce long-held beliefs, Le Procès d’Oscar Wilde does not lay claim to completeness or exclusiveness. It is rather a question of rereading, rewriting and recalling between the lines of a nib, of a voice, that were meant to be febrile, not docile. Thanks to the multiplicity of angles chosen, the audience is given the opportunity to do just that.

True, the rhythm of the sequences is at times notably slow. The viewers’ patience is sometimes put to the test. Prolonged silences could indicate Merlhiot has met with a dead end. But is this delayed accomplishment of some definite conclusion not the entire purpose? Merlhiot is actually very deft at tailoring the images to the development of the spoken argument. The ever-expanding impersonation of Wilde’s temperament which is at stake, which is brought to the fore, is not only a willing suspension of disbelief. It also shows that the real truth about Oscar somehow always remains out of reach, always contrasted and imbued with mystery.

Le Procès d’Oscar Wilde therefore epitomizes a recent literary phenomenon which consists in investigating the lives of renowned historical figures through the means of fiction. Biographical novels and plays about Oscar Wilde abound. We may cite, for instance, Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), Moisés Kaufman’s Gross Indecency. The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1998) or Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries (2007-). Casting new light on what Oscar Wilde might have been like, contemporary biographical fictions either intermingle the various facets of his outstanding personality or focus their attention on one particular aspect. In any case, they set out to fathom and describe a voice, to make a figure from the past more accessible to the present mind. Just like the initial scene in Le Procès d’Oscar Wilde illustrates, biofictions are essentially a translation. This translation of an image into words, of an era into another, of a man into multiple personalities highlights today’s concern with the past and the need to revisit it, to capture its fragrances and give an enduring but fluctuating image of it, so that the past will never be able to entirely escape the room, imprisoned in a ‘huis clos’ situation.

This having been said, Le Procès d’Oscar Wilde is firmly anchored in the present time and differs, in that respect, from most biographical fictions and biographical films (biopics). Contrary to Kaufman’s aforementioned play Gross Indecency, for example, it does not promote people ‘in period costume’ but simply updates, so to speak, well-known court records. Le ‘procès’ thus turns into a most original trial of strength between alternative voices revived through one single protagonist, Nasri Sayegh. This not only brings originality to Merlhiot’s film. It equally contributes to the depiction of an enigmatic Oscar Wilde, who, just like his chameleon-like impersonator, was immersed in a world full of paradoxes and himself became a master of appearances.

Le Procès d’Oscar Wilde is rich in images and metaphors. The horizon is either vast and multi-angled, or closed and restricted. Colours are either dark and cold, or bright and warm. But in any case, the different perspectives testify to the multifacetedness of life and art, of yesterday and today and demonstrate that cut-and-dried opinions are merely an option, not the solution. Also, they point to the inquestionable and intricate link between past and present. The historical, real-life Oscar may have passed away but his fictional counterpart is still thriving. As Wilde once wrote, ‘The truth is rarely pure and never simple.’ Cleverly enough, Le Procès d’Oscar Wilde does not attempt to nullify this epigram. It plays with all the denotations and connotations of this ‘bon mot’. It actualizes its implications. A must-see, definitely.

v Kirby Joris is Aspirante F.R.S.-FNRS (Research Fellow - National Fund for Scientific Research) in English Literature at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. Her Ph.D project investigates a selected corpus of contemporary biographical novels (1983-) narrated in the first-person and focusing on the personal life/lives of Oscar Wilde, and, to a lesser extent, those of Virginia Woolf and Henry James.

v For another review, by Marta Raczak, click here.

Review by Frederick S. Roden (University of Connecticut)

Reinventing Oscar

Uwe Boker, Richard Corballis, and Julie A. Hibbard, eds., The Importance of Reinventing Oscar: Versions of Wilde during the Last 100 Years. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 2002. 303pp. US$55, paperback.

The Importance of Reinventing Oscar is a valuable addition to the field of Wilde studies: particularly that genre that has appeared in recent years, the afterlife of Wilde/studies. Why do we need yet another collection of essays about the fin-de-siècle æsthete? This volume provides an Anglophone audience a range of voices on Wilde, and offers many wonderful, short pieces. Developed out of a conference held in Dresden, Reinventing Oscar contributes to re-envisioning the landscape of Wilde studies as Anglo-American critics have constructed it. While the editors note the familiar interest in Wilde found in Germany – and in the volume provide some excellent representative voices from that tradition – they also demonstrate that an international Wilde studies must take into account a history of scholarship which has often gone unnoticed in Anglophone criticism. Reinventing Oscar provides some unique perspectives, a range of fine analyses of popular culture, and a good assortment of practical criticism.

The first pleasure for the Wilde scholar in encountering this volume is its copia. Its 300 densely-printed pages present twenty-eight different voices as well as the editors’ provocative introduction. Contributors range from the United States and United Kingdom, to Germany, Russia, New Zealand, Hungary, Ireland, and Bosnia. As the editors note, ‘this is the first time that a body of [Wilde] criticism from Eastern Europe has appeared alongside essays from the West’ (9). This point inflects the thematic orientation of the book. While the first half of Reinventing Oscar offers traditional literary criticism from an array of different approaches (and by scholars hailing from a variety of places), the second half of the volume is concerned with interpretations and appropriations of Wilde from inside and outside the English-speaking world. To be sure, those first 150 pages offer lots of good essays – which I will briefly refer to here. The second half of the book, which examines the ‘versions of Wilde,’ makes it unique.

Of course, the entire volume is part of the ongoing project of ‘reinventing’ Wilde studies, ‘Wilde culture,’ and the ‘Wilde industry.’ John Dawick begins Reinventing Oscar with an essay on The Importance of Being Earnest, which comments on the significance of Edwardian revivals of the play. David Rose provides a thoughtful reflection on ‘Oscar Wilde: Socialite or Socialist? – pursuing the question of what we do with the thought found in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism.’ Wilde’s decadence is discussed as ‘penalties of modernism,’ the title of Kirby Farrell’s piece, while the trials form the subject of Ronald Griffin’s contribution. Jurgen Klein theorizes an ‘æsthetic of coldness’ in Wilde, while Susanne Schmid makes an effective comparison between the author and Lord Byron with respect to the figure of the dandy. Waleska Schwandt analyzes the stereotype of the æsthete in an article that includes some wonderful nineteenth-century caricatures from the periodical press. Michael Meyer invokes Baudrillard to mount an intriguing interrogation of the relationship between Wilde’s lecture tour in America and his self-presentation at the trials. He writes: ‘Whereas the [Harvard] students ridiculed the dissemination of æstheticism through their serial reproduction of effeminate æsthetes, the court punished the dissemination of decadence through Wilde’s alleged transformation of the young men he seduced into feminised homosexuals’ (105).

Three essays pointedly question gender and issues related to Women’s Studies. Ines Detmers writes on ‘Oscar’s Fashion: Constructing a Rhetoric of Androgyny.’ Franz Meier’s article on ‘the myth of the femme fatale in Fin-de-Siècle culture’ elegantly complements Ann Heilmann’s piece on ‘Wilde’s New Women: The New Woman on Wilde.’ Following Stefan Lange’s reflection on Wilde’s concept of love, Reinventing Oscar clusters three essays concerning Wilde’s influence upon Modern Irish literature. These contributions serve as a fine transition to the next part of book. Richard Corballis writes on Joyce’s Ulysses, Catrin Siedenbiedel on Finnegans Wake, and Noreen Doody on Yeats. The three critics effectively bridge the Anglo-American tradition with the volume’s internationalism: in returning home to Wilde’s native Ireland.

We move from literary criticism of Wilde and his world to all sorts of reflections about our own. It would have been useful for the editors to offer some guidance in this process. I have divided this book up according to the clear but unfortunately unspoken strategy that exists in the volume. In their preface, the editors indicate the intention of their Dresden conference: to focus on the ‘afterlife’ of Wilde. To be fair, they admit that by the ‘time the conference came around, the emphasis had largely shifted to Wilde’s own life and works and contexts’ (10). While acknowledging the contributions of some post-Wildeans here, the editors really underrate the iconoclastic nature of what the volume offers. The amount of scholarly discussion about Wilde-inspired works is extraordinary, and like the issue of internationalism raised above, sets Reinventing Oscar apart.

Heike Haase’s ‘Oscar Wilde in Crime Literature’ provides a delightful discussion of contemporary detective fiction that creates Wilde as a character. Lucia Krämer looks at fictional biographies of Wilde in both drama and prose, including not only recent works but also those from the early twentieth century. Martin Middeke evaluates Peter Ackroyd’s invention on the Wilde vita. There are several excellent pieces that consider Wilde in twentieth-century drama, analyzing works by Joe Orton, David Hare, Tom Stoppard, Moises Kaufman, Jill Fleming and Mark Ravenhill. Beatrix Hesse, Anja Muller-Muth, and Annette Pankratz examine those dramatists. The volume also includes a critique of the 1997 film ‘Wilde,’ argued by Christoph Houswitschka. While the above are German critics, all focus upon English-language works. The next series of contributions to the volume takes on the question of translation and Wilde’s place in cultural traditions outside of England.

Patrick Bridgwater discusses early German responses to Oscar Wilde, beginning with writers of the 1890s and including Max Nordau’s attack on Decadence. Maria Kozyreva follows with an article on twentieth-century Russian translations of The Ballad of Reading Gaol (there are six, the last completed in 1970). She states that

Oscar Wilde may be considered one of the most popular British authors in Russia. His creative works have been published in good translations here since the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1912 his complete works were published – a rare event for an English author, among the other writers of the time, only Rudyard Kipling was honoured in the same way. If Germany was the country which started Oscar Wilde’s literary rehabilitation, Russia is the place where interest in his writings has never faded to this day. Wilde is widely translated, read and staged here now as he was one hundred years ago. (249)

Krisztina Lajosi also takes on the question of translation, in commenting on the impact of Wilde in Hungary. She observes that the majority of Hungarian Wilde translations and criticism appeared in the early twentieth century. Zvonimir Radeljkovic reminisces about reading Wilde’s fairy tales as a Bosnian boy in the 1950s from a 1956 Sarajevo publication that provided side-by-side English with Serbo-Croatian translation. Wilde’s Salome appeared on the Zagreb stage in 1905, and De Profundis was translated in 1915. Radeljkovic notes that altogether there were sixty-five reviews, essays, and articles on Wilde published in periodicals in Serbo-Croatian between 1905 and 1945. In a direct political vein, Anna-Christina Giovanopoulos writes of Wilde studies in East Germany:

The literary institutions would only be allowed to publish works by an author who could easily be regarded as decadent if they succeeded in presenting a Wilde that fitted into current cultural policies. Wilde’s personal attitudes, his æstheticism, and homosexuality were in stark contrast to the prevailing ideology of Socialism which called for literature to support the new notions the Communist Party had been trying to establish since the late nineteen-forties and, with renewed impetus, since 1951. (275)

She concludes that Wilde’s ‘subversiveness was contained in Socialist countries through a censorship system which depended upon communication and negotiation’ (281).

Reinventing Oscar finishes with Fritz-Wilhelm Neumann’s essay on ‘Wilde’s Afterlife in Cyberspace’ – which of course concerns yet another kind of cultural and linguistic translation. While in a brief review it is difficult to do justice to an edited volume – particularly one with so many contributors – I highly recommend this collection. If one might have wished for greater structure and argument on the editors’ part, their selection of voices that demonstrate the breadth of the field makes this book worthwhile. The project itself accomplishes a certain kind of translation, bringing some critical histories to unfamiliar audiences. On that note, it is significant that Reinventing Oscar weds such different strands of work. The volume’s title reminds us of the many ‘versions’ of Wilde and Wildeana we are destined to find – certainly in the afterlife of an important contribution to the field as this book.

v Frederick S. Roden is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture and the editor of Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies.

v This is the first of an occasional series of reviews where older works on Wilde are revisited.

Review by Leonée Ormond

The Duchess of Padua

The Pentameters Theatre, Hampstead. April-May 2010

It is startling to realise that Oscar Wilde’s early play, The Duchess of Padua, recently in production at the Pentameters Theatre in Hampstead, had previously achieved only one performance in England. This was the formal copyright staging in 1907, more than thirty years after Wilde completed the play. A few professional stagings are recorded, including the first production, a three week run in New York in 1891, and later performances in Germany and in Ireland.

The Duchess of Padua is, of course, quite unlike the plays for which Wilde is most famous, and biographers and critics have been inclined to say that it is unstageable, that it draws too heavily upon Shakespeare, Jacobean tragedy and Shelley’s The Cenci. The task of avenging a dead father inevitably provokes memories of Hamlet, and the conclusion, with the death by suicide of the lovers, recalls Romeo and Juliet.

In five acts, each with a different set, The Duchess of Padua was written for an audience accustomed to elaborate productions of Shakespeare. Wilde’s detailed stage directions evoke the renaissance city of Padua. He takes care to describe architecture, statuary and furniture, with special instructions about the use of particular colours and sounds. At the Pentameters, the drama was played out against a rough wall, with three entrances, one at the back and one at each side. These doors are integral to some of the more sinister and threatening moments of the play. The eavesdropping Count Moranzone lurked behind one, making enough noise to alert the audience, and, at other times, members of the cast, including the Duke, suddenly erupted onto the stage. One entrance hid the site of a murder, until, Macbeth like, the Duchess of Padua appeared grasping the sword with which she had just killed her husband.

The first, New York, production of the play, produced by Lawrence Barrett, changed the title to Guido Ferranti. This switch, from the heroine to the hero, would have not have been misplaced at the Pentameters, where the fate of Guido, played by Rupert Savage, was central to the audience’s response. We see more deeply into his thought processes than we do into those of the Duchess. This performance opened in the dark, and then, as the murk cleared, we saw two young men, Guido Ferranti and his faithful friend, Ascanio Cristofano. They have come to Padua so that Guido can meet an anonymous letter writer who has promised to tell him the truth about his father’s identity. This made for a dramatic start, intensified when the black garbed Monanzone appeared, insisting that Ascanio leaves before he tells Guido the dreadful tale.

Moranzone, played with genuine menace by Nick. J. Field, is something of an Iago figure. When he recruited Guido as a murderer, the audience was left wondering whether he was lying. In fact, he is telling the truth and when we saw the villainous Duke, we could believe him. Like Mephistopheles, Moranzone continues to pass through the action. When Guido and the Duchess Beatrice declare their love, he is concealed behind them. After the murder is committed, he begs Guido to flee, and then tries to defend him during his trial.

Moranzone’s interventions in the play are part of an overall pattern where Guido is forced to deny love and feeling in the name of honour, of the need to revenge his father’s death. Hamlet and Ophelia are certainly in the background here. Hearing that the machinations of Simone Gesso, the Duke of Padua, brought his father to the scaffold, Guido swears to kill the Duke and, on Moranzone’s instructions, sends Ascanio away. This is something of a flaw in the drama, as our interest has been aroused by the relationship of the two young men and we can share Ascanio’s bewilderment at their enforced parting in the first act. We anticipate that he will return later, but this element of the play is left unresolved. Ascanio never comes back. Then, Guido having fallen in love with the Duchess, Moranzone forces him to reject her by demanding that he commit the murder on the same night. The serious and moral Guido realises that he must kill the Duke out of the highest motives and not because of his love for the Duchess. Eventually, this is all too much, even for him, and he decides to leave a note saying that he has spared the Duke’s life, only to discover that the Duchess has acted instead. For the third time in the play, Guido rejects the one closest to him, refusing to have anything to do with Beatrice in his horror at her action.

Rupert Savage gave an excellent account of Guido’s inner battles, and Wilde’s long blank verse speeches, which may look undramatic on the page, came across with exceptional clarity. When, at the end of the fourth act, Guido confesses to the murder in order to save Beatrice, and when the Duchess, who has incriminated him, cries out in anguish as he is led away, Wilde’s skill as a dramatist was fully evident.

The play was originally written for the American actress, Mary Anderson, who, having paid Wilde £1000, read it and turned it down, denying him the remaining £4000. It is not difficult to see why Mary Anderson, to be famous a few years later playing another good woman with a bullying husband, Hermione in A Winter’s Tale, decided that Wilde’s Beatrice, who falls in love with a young courtier and then commits a murder in her passion for him, was not the part for her. In Victoria Porter’s performance, the Duchess with her sympathy for the poor and downtrodden, came across as a true Wilde heroine, a woman in pursuit of personal freedom. In some of his more light-hearted plays, as in Salome, it is the woman who, like the Duchess, performs the liberating act, while the man draws back. One small problem at the Pentameters was that a few of the Duchess’s speeches were pronounced with such fervour, and at such a speed, that the sense was lost.

Peter Gerald was outstanding as the Duke of Padua, his verbal attacks on his wife and on the people of Padua played with dry humour. Although the Duke disappears from the stage after only two acts a strong impression remained. This play, so rarely performed has something of a jinx on it. Lawrence Barrett died a few weeks after it closed prematurely in New York and it is said that the actor who played the Cardinal of Padua in Berlin in 1906 went mad. At the Pentameters, Peter Gerald took over the part of the Duke following the illness of the original actor which delayed the opening for a week.

This powerful production by Rafe Beckley of course raises a question. Should the play have been performed here before? Certainly it deserves to be seen as an uncharacteristic example of Wilde’s writing for the theatre. But it also deserves to be seen because it works in the theatre. With its moments of pure drama, in the court scene for example, or at the end of the play, when we wait for the poison which Beatrice has drunk to take effect, The Duchess of Padua can undoubtedly work on the stage. The small space of the Pentameters and the bare set were far from being a disadvantage. With the fine verse speaking these were a major factor in the success of this production.

v Leonée Ormond is Professor Emerita of Victorian Studies at King's College, London. Her review of PuppetCraft’s version of The Selfish Giant can be found here.

Review by John McRae

TELEOLOGY

Jon Macy : Teleny and Camille – the graphic novel

I was not very aware of the graphic novel as a genre or text-type until I supervised a doctoral thesis by Mario Saraceni, which became the significant book The Language of Comics (Routledge, 2003). This introduced me to the conventions and the classics of the genre, from Maus to Sin City.

But to some extent it was ever thus. Aubrey Beardsley was illustrating Le Morte d’Arthur exactly as the putative manuscript of Teleny was being passed around among its contributors.

Styles have developed, conventions been affirmed and transcended, and classics of the genre have been filmed, to strangely familiar echoes of the claim that the novel was unfilmable, the film was a travesty that could never do justice to the book etc etc.

And at another level, generations have grown up with illustrated comic book versions of the classics.

What Jon Macy has done, with enormously pleasing success, is actually render the classic 1890s novel Teleny as a fully fledged graphic novel. It is as 21st century as it could be, with digital and print versions available. But what must have been most difficult for the graphic author (surely more than just an illustrator) is to find the drawn idiom that fits the original text and makes the move from verbal to visual seem natural. This is a balancing act which involves great finesse and sensitivity: an artist of the calibre of Beardsley evolved his own graphic idiom at a young age, and whether he was drawing texts by Aristophanes, Malory, Pope, or Wilde the visual artist’s own distinctive imprint, perhaps we should call it style, was immediately evident. And of course he captures brilliantly the spirit of the verbal texts he is working from.

Jon Macy would be the first to recognise he is not a new Beardsley, nor does he intend to be. That would surely be one anxiety of influence too many. And too obvious.

The artwork of the covers for Teleny, so usefully documented in Danielle Guérin’s contribution to THE OSCHOLARS Special Issue on the book shows how the covers have in some ways kept pace with the times and the attitudes of the times – from the tenebrous to the light, one might suggest. When we were preparing the 1986 GMP edition (no. 2 in Guérin’s list) it was deliberate policy to keep the cover as ‘straight’ as possible: a classic photo of Wilde for a ‘classic’ novel. When that edition was taken up and reissued by Millivres (number 19), it was time for coyness and Victorian imagery to go out the window and a sexy, sassy, explicitly vivid use of imagery heralded a novel that needed no apology. (I was not consulted until the very last minute, when I was shown the cover. I think they thought I might object, but even if I had, the print run had been sanctioned. The fait accompli was fun, and accomplished what a good cover should do – it stimulated more sales of the book. )

What Jon Macy has done is deceptively simple. It is a re-telling of the tale, but with the presence of the teller, the artist, consciously a part of the process. As the author wrote in his piece on the graphic novel on this site:

Teleny and Camille is a 228-page black and white graphic novel which goes beyond the original text by including a short story that shows the difficulties I experienced during the process.

In that prefatory text he also indicates, in the short extract given, where he saw the main turning point of the novel, a perception that clearly informs his whole telling of the tale.

There is also a six-page excerpt from the main body of the work. I have chosen the scene where Camille follows Teleny and Briancourt into the park and sees men cruising men for sex for the first time. In my opinion this is a turning point for the character. Camille willingly takes his first step into a new world and identity.

So from the outset Macy’s take on the novel is as a ‘voyage of discovery,’ something of a Bildungsroman. As such, it respects the original ‘journey’ of the character, but it does not set out to create shock and scandal, with all the titillation and vicarious thrills that the 1893 version did. Rather it aims to bring the sensibility ahead into what Alan Sinfield called ‘the Wilde Century’ and the perhaps more familiar trope of coming to terms with one’s sexuality.

It was clearly a labour of love:

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did drawing these classic characters and their world.

It is instructive to compare these visual story-telling sequences with the rather more imagistic linocuts by Uday K. Dhar for the Mondial Press edition. The impact, the function, the artistic raison d’être of the two visual representations could hardly be more different, and each is equally successful in it own right. Uday K. Dhar gives vivid, sometimes disturbing impressions from the text, where Macy gives representative interpreted visions of the text.

The function of this visual text is, therefore, importantly different from the function of the original verbal text. It was never just intended as an illustrated version of the original, but is a re-reading and re-telling of the story from a social and generational standpoint a century and more beyond the original. Faithful it is, arguably more faithful than some of the more dire recent cinematic versions of Wilde’s texts.

Wilde has to be one of the most re-interpreted and recycled of all authors. His works are more than simply ‘in the public domain’. They are there to be mauled about, restaged, plagiarised and reformed with what used to be known as gay abandon. And they usually resist everything, including the temptation to disappear under the welter of new ownerships that beset them.

Hence it is pleasing to see how Macy’s kind of fidelity respects and indeed renews the original. He wants explicitly to make it ‘not an obscene Victorian novel but an unapologetic celebration of same sex love. ’ This is entirely justified in the last pages of the original novel. Is it reduced by being ‘a sweet and tragic story of love between two men’? Well, I fear all but the most avid devotee of the original would agree there are less well-written scenes in the original, scenes that could even be omitted, scenes that are not directly related to the basic through line. But the tribunal Jon Macy fears might judge his ‘Wildean crimes’ (better as crimes against Wilde, no?) will not have to sit. The heart of the matter is safe, the tale is told, the love affirmed, the time transcended.

So will the readers today like the actual style of drawing? Macy’s style has elements of the comic-book romance, popular and populist – his avowed intent is to get away from a surfeit of chintz, and that he certainly does. ‘It is naked boys and debauchery after all,’ as he so rightly says in his preamble.

It is also sex in the city, albeit in the shadows of the city: Central Park rather more than Hyde Park, but a universal midnight garden of good and evil. To this Jon Macy brings his experience in a range of black and white visuals from horror comics to adventures in the skin trade. This is a perfect mix of resources and inspiration to suit the tone and content of Teleny.

Interesting that he should want to retitle it Teleny and Camille. Focus on the love pairing rather than the individual is part of the intention. And in fact he is remarkably restrained in his depiction of what might be termed pornographic – the occasional splash reminiscent of Tom of Finland, but little that would bring too much of a blush to the cheek of the young person nowadays. That said, the thrust is definitely erotic, the atmosphere redolent of lust, jealousy, uncertainty, the pangs of disprised love.

At 228 pages, it is a massive undertaking. For one who is familiar with the original text, it is a quick read, as the scenes come to life without great need of the selected accompanying text. Indeed, one is sometimes drawn back to consult the verbal text, while wanting to run on ahead with the visual reading. That balance between verbal text and visuals seems to me to work very well indeed. For one who comes to the text fresh, I imagine there will be more recourse to the verbal, but as back-up, explication, revelation of thought-processes, rather than to understand or follow the plot.

The gap between each vignette is fundamental to how the story moves along, the ‘between the lines’ of a graphic novel. The smooth flow of such gaps means quite simply that the reader does not notice them: curious incident, the gaps do not bark, the flow seems as natural as it can be. And that is a major triumph in graphic story-telling.

There is one stunning innovation right at the end. Jon Macy wittily decides that as one of the many hands involved in the ‘creation’ of the text he can join that anonymous group of creators who passed the manuscript around in the early 1890s (at least in the widely accepted story of the novel’s creation). So he gives himself the wondrous liberty of adding an extra final chapter. Are there purists who will say he was wrong? Indeed is ‘purist’ a word we can associate with Teleny? Macy has made his final triumphant assertive chapter a proper resurrection, continuation and celebration of the love the novel describes. It moves the action forward to a time when the love dare speak its name, and Teleny can love, and shall play again.

There is an agenda here, and it is not simply the visual re-telling of a well-known novel. It is a celebration of that novel and a celebration of what that novel deeply wants to assert. It is an artistic and aesthetic triumph.

(The book is available through nefarismo@gmail. com; the author’s website is www. jonmacy. com)

v John McRae has been at the forefront of work on the language and literature interface since the publication of his Reading Between the Lines in 1984. In 2008, he edited THE OSCHOLARS Special Issue on Teleny, and will consider further essays on the subject for inclusion in an expanded edition. The Special Issue contains two excerpts from Jon Macy’s work.

Review by Ignacio Ramos Gay (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha)

Lottman’s Wilde

Herbert Lottman : Oscar Wilde en Paris (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2009), tr Javier Albiñana 

The influence of foreign literatures upon Oscar Wilde’s oeuvre has been widely studied throughout the twentieth century. According to critics, since the very publication of his poems, Wilde’s philosophy of composition has oscillated between the claim for originality and the stigma of plagiarism. Any literary fecundity that his works might have displayed has been subjugated by the echoes of previous voices. In this sense, contemporary editions of his works have accurately traced the presence of French, German, English, Classic and Biblical sources in order to affirm that Wilde’s intertextual allusions were a means to stimulate a creativity that mirrored a multicultural interest in literature as a supra-national and trans-epochal art. Amongst all these voices that haunt his writings, French classics hold an important position. For instance, his first poems reveal the impact caused by modern symbolist poets like Baudelaire and Mallarmé, as well as the influence of Keats, Swinburne, Rossetti, Milton and the classics. This is why an unsigned review published in The Spectator, 13 August 1881, regarded them as ‘the trash of man of a certain amount of mimetic ability, and trash the trashiness of which the author is much too cultivated not to recognise quite clearly’ (Beckson, 47). The influence of previous and contemporary writers on Wilde is undeniable and, consequently, recent critics have defined his conceptualization of art as a ‘collage’. In Florina Tufescu’s words, ‘Wilde’s poetry is not essentially different from the rest of his work: it reveals the same irony, ‘instability of meaning’ and bold intertextual techniques’ (64). The same could apply to his only novel – an heir of Huysmans’ À rebours (1884) – and to his essays, taking after Pater’s and Baudelaire’s aesthetics writings. Analogously, Anya Clayworth’s 2004 edition of Wilde’s journalism draws a list of quotations in French from Balzac that the playwright memorised and resourcefully included in his text. The voices of Goethe, Flaubert, Baudelaire and Gautier, as well as full quotations from the Bible, pepper his correspondence, notably De Profundis, a letter written during his incarceration and in which passages from the French masters or from the Holy Scripture depended exclusively on his legendary memory.

As a consequence of this, multiple doctoral dissertations and scholarly publications have been devoted to unearth the intertextual and biographic connections between Wilde and the French literary scene in order to provide the necessary evidence to expose Wilde’s dependency on French authors as a reliable source of inspiration. Stanley Schwarz’s seminal study (1933) of the similarities between the use of irony and aphorisms in Wilde’s dandies and Dumas fils’s raisonneurs was completed by Kelver Hartley’s 1935 historiographic and comprehensive account of the influence of French literature on Wilde’s plays and prose and by E.H. Mikhail’s analysis of the devices of the well-made play in his society comedies (1968). A wider investigation of the impact of French drama upon English dramatists in the last two decades of the nineteenth century was carried out by Raafat (1970), and, similarly, Powell (1990), Eltis (1996) and Ramos-Gay (2007) have pointed at a myriad of genetic intertexts between boulevard vaudevillistes and mélodramatistes and Wilde’s society comedies. Powell’s conclusion on the philosophy of composition of The Importance of Being Earnest could be applied to the rest of Wilde’s oeuvre for, as the critic states, ‘without a thorough, practical knowledge of what was being done in the lowly theatrical genre of farce in the 1890s’, that is to say, without the models provided by his ‘obscure forerunners’, Wilde would have had, ‘little or nothing to say’ (124-125). His opinion follows suit Alfred Douglas’s recollection of Wilde’s own statement on his art for, according to Bosie, ‘Wilde (...) told me that from Pinero and Dumas fils he had learnt all he knew of stagecraft’ (221). Modern approaches to Wilde’s work have encompassed biographical data and textual interpretation, and a myriad of scholars – chiefly Tufescu (2008), Macfarlane (2007), Robson (2005), Saint-Amour (2000) and Guy (1998) – have revaluated Wilde’s aesthetics as a celebration of intertextuality and pastiche, which in many a case could rally with blatant illicit appropriation, as the poet himself confessed to the Bancrofts when discussing the performance of Lady Windermere’s Fan. In the actor’s words,

He was talking with us about one of his comedies, just produced, when my wife remarked that the leading situation rather reminded her of the great scene in a play by Scribe, to which Wilde unblushingly replied: ‘taken bodily from it, dear lady. Why not? Nobody reads nowadays’ (112).

Moreover, mid-century revisions of Wilde’s biography have corroborated textual archaeology, and the poet’s friendship with the French symbolist poets – chiefly Stéphane Mallarmé – has been widely discussed by Hesketh Pearson (1946), Eileen Souffrin (1959) and H. P. Clive (1970). Wilde’s francophilia can be easily observed through his words, constantly lauding the profession of the French man of letters in comparison to the English literary scene. His threat to abandon the country and to become a French citizen after the banning of his play Salomé, together with his final years’ retirement to Berneval-sur-mer and Paris make clear his inclination to France, as Wright’s recent study (2008) states after examining his life in the light of the books he read and praised.

This bulk of academic work reflects a dazzling infatuation with France that led to a negotiation of Wilde’s cultural and national identity. As the playwright himself dryly declared when Salomé was banned, ‘I shall leave England to settle in France where I shall take our letters of naturalization. I will not consent to call myself a citizen of a country that shows such narrowness in artistic judgement’ (Ellmann, 351-352). Oscar Wilde’s life embodied the assimilation of a mystified image of France, constructed by means of successive journeys to Paris and his friendship with the French intellectual bohème. For the poet, France represented a cultural icon that was to be emulated in order to achieve artistic proficiency and public reputation. Just as Matthew Arnold, Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle had pointed at the beneficial aspects French politics could teach their English country fellowmen in order to improve themselves as a nation, Wilde’s un-English francophilia looked up to France as a means to expand one’s horizon and to educate the philistines on the glory and nobility of art.

A new biography on Wilde and Paris was expected to scrutinise, from a biographic standpoint, all these aspects stated by modern scholarship by means of factual and textual interpretation. Lottman’s work was presumed to trace a journey of Wilde’s visits to France in order to reconstruct the events that account for his francomaniac infatuation. The author’s reference to the French capital in his title reflects a metonymic understanding of the whole country, and implies a symbolic incarnation of French art and culture by its capital city. During the nineteenth century, France was equated to Paris, and a fresh biography of Wilde’s French years needed to evoke both his life experiences and the mythical image of the French capital city constructed by the Britons.

However, what we find in Lottman’s work is, literally, a collection of Wilde’s adventures in Paris. The author traces an arbitrary account of a number of facts relating the poet to France or to any French author accounted by Wilde’s biographers. Indeed, this new biography will be of interest for all those aiming at discovering Wilde’s francomania on a factual level, for the whole book stands as a recompilation of scenes, dialogues and situations simply describing either his friendship with a number of French authors both before and after the trials, or merely taking place in France. Unfortunately, Paris is reduced to a nude geographical location deprived of any symbolic or cultural connotation. Although it centres and locates most of the action of Wilde’s itinerary, the bare disinterest with which Lottman attempts to reproduce the fervent fin de siècle literary scene displays a total lack of understanding of the aesthetic implications of Wilde’s penchant for France during his lifetime and throughout his work. Lottman’s Paris could easily be replaced by any other capital city either of the civilised or the uncivilised world, for the art galleries, the monuments, the restaurants, the exhibitions, the theatres, the cafés, the music-halls, and the vast amount of artistic and literary entertainments that drew Wilde to the French capital are flagrantly dismissed from the text, let alone all the references to the work of the most eminent poets, novelists and painters. As a result of this, the names of Zola, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Jarry or Rodin, are purely transcribed onto the narrative, for no attempt to relate – not to mention research into – their lives or works to Wilde’s is ever contemplated in the book.

It would not be reductive to call Lottman’s book a simplified anthology assembling tales and stories of Wilde’s trips to Paris. As such, Lottman’s anxiety of neutrality and objectivism sparks a dry succession of unrelated anecdotes leading to a chaotic ensemble unchronologically connected. The information is just randomly thrown to the reader without any sense of textual, narrative or historical progression. Indeed, the book is framed by Wilde’s initial visits to the capital and by his final death at the Hotel d’Alsace. However, if the collected anecdotes were to be read in random order, the overaching story proposed would unfortunately remain identical. It is worth noting that one of the strengths of Lottman’s analysis is the extensive research of previous biographies, from which the author gathers substantial information and material on Wilde’s Parisian life and activities. Additionally, in many occasions he openly contrasts Harris’s accounts with Ellmann’s, Pearson’s, Hyde’s or Morley’s so that the reader reader may respond to the text by choosing from the material presented and developing his own version from several biographers’ fictionalization of Wilde’s life. Such a methodological approach endows the reader with the power to contemplate the complexities and contradictions of his career as a man of letters. Yet in no case does Lottman interpret these anecdotes per se, or related to prior or future events. Except for a few hints of facile suspense predicting prospective incidents, the author does not set the information within its cultural, artistic or historic context. Nor does he relate it to Wilde’s oeuvre or aesthetics. The result is a monotonous succession of facts that automatically evaporate from the reader’s mind once the reading has come to an end. Ironically enough, one of Lottman’s rare comments could easily apply to his own systematic approach: in describing André Gide’s reflections on Wilde, the biographer declares that the Frenchman ‘seems to be too naive in his appreciations, which may be due to his lack of perspective and experience. He observes and writes down everything that occurs around him, but we miss some comparisons with other places, other people and other times.’[1] Lottman’s reflections on Gide summarise his own methodology and composition, ruled by sheer blind compilation rather than selective development and critical progression.

Paradoxically, however, Lottman’s anecdotical narrative turns into a structured, chronological story right when he starts relating the only period in Wilde’s life during which the poet was completely segregated from France, that is, during his trials and imprisonment. The analysis of Wilde’s prosecution and of his English and French friends’ reaction to it displays a more orchestrated textual organisation despoiled of superficial facts and episodic events. Lottman closely conforms to the chronology of the facts that ignited the trials, as well as the poet’s imprisonment and its impact on the French press. That neither the Parisian newspapers nor a number of French literary eminences condemned unanimously Wilde’s incarceration was a well-known fact. The author accurately describes their unblushing refusal to acknowledge their friendship with Wilde and, in so doing, he takes sides with the poet by propelling a number of vilifying side comments. Thus we come across excerpts where he adjectivises the French’s attitude as ‘disappointing’ (113)[2] or he eulogises Octave Mirbeau, one of the few defenders of the Wildean cause, for ‘doing what he had to do’ (123).[3] Indeed such spontaneous demonstrations of moral condemnation or laudation have nothing to do with biographic record and drown the narrative into the realm of second-rate fiction or journalistic propaganda.

As Wilde is constantly evoked in relation with his Parisian acquaintances, the narrative is rife with references to conversations, opinions and conjectures articulated by his French contemporaries. As the narrative unfolds, Lottman seems to argue that these were purely occasional and ephemeral. A dormant hypothesis throughout the whole book asserts that Wilde’s acquaintances, Gide, Bernhardt, Zola, i.e. the whole literary milieu Wilde admired, actually despised the Irish author after having been found guilty of ‘gross indecency’. The author insists upon Wilde’s erroneous and fallacious perception of the French cultural scene, but adds little or no new evidence on those of his friends, either French or English, who supported him throughout the ordeal of the trial and his final exile. The resulting effect is rather the opposite, for the author seems to tacitly assume that Wilde’s perception of France was unequivocally wrong, and that his mystification of the French cultural scene as one defending the artist’s freedom was rather a romantic illusion. With Lottman’s biography, a new Madame Bovary seems to be born, for as in Flaubert’s novel, the author suggests that Wilde’s readings of the classics he idolised led him to a certain death. Following a strange sense of poetic justice, the author seems to undertake an insinuated revenge on Wilde’s time and friends. Yet his aim is not to restore Wilde’s name or literary career within the history of Western literature, but to simply condemn those who betrayed the terms of his friendship and his illusory mental constructs.

It is important to note that Lottman’s intention is not to resuscitate Wilde under the light of fresh data leading to a moral or literary redemption within his epoch. If any, Lottman’s revaluation of the Irishman’s lifetime must be described as an original attempt to go against the grain of modern scholarship. The current invocation of Wilde as a martyr of the philistines and as an icon of sexual liberation is completely ignored by the author. Julia Wood’s statement that the public, ‘rather than looking at him, [tends] to look through [Wilde], finding in him an invaluable point of reference for issues and preoccupations central to their own lives’ (20) applies here not to the entirety of postmodern scholarship and readership, but to the biographer himself. Lottman’s narrative is deeply marked by a bizarre obsession with Wilde’s sexuality that goes hand in hand with a quaint sense of guilt associated to his sexual orientation. The author seems therefore unaware of the fact that no few scholars have argued the playwright’s unremorseful perception as to the crime he was tried for. For instance, in his most autobiographical text, De Profundis, references to homosexuality are completely omitted in the letter, yet less as a sign of his subjugation to the social law than as a liberal understanding of a sexual condition that should not have to be defended against society. As John Stokes observes, ‘not once in De Profundis does Wilde make homosexuality per se the cause of his suffering, and the attack on Douglas refers less to his sexual conduct than to his inherited temperament’ (44). Lottman’s personal impression of Wilde’s sexuality obscures academic investigation, and his account of the poet’s life is more revealing of his own private obsessions than of those of the object of his study.

Lottman’s initial definition of Wilde as ‘the living image of the homosexual’ (21) sets the tone for the rest of the biography. The whole text is constantly penetrated by the author’s moral reflections on homosexuality, promiscuity and paedophilia. The private life of Wilde as an individual is only related from a sexual perspective and illustrated by a number of morbid and lurid details that do not contribute in the least to the understanding of Wilde’s persona. Lottman’s specification of the number of orgasms reached by André Gide with a certain Mohammed (87),[4] his coarse allusion to the debate generated in France upon Wilde’s being ‘active’ or ‘passive’, and the association of homosexual ‘passivity’ with paedophilia (103)[5] depart from the context of biographic record to fall within the shallowness and bad taste of cheap yellow press comments.

Analogously, the shadow of a slight homophobia looms large in Lottman’s consideration of Wilde’s ‘little friends’ (190) or ‘little presents’ (64), and his unjustified appreciation of Sherard as a ‘weird character’ (23).[6] The adjective choice is not an innocent one, and a more than substantial dose of bigotry and prejudice is denoted in his words when declaring that Pierre Louÿs ‘willingly accepted Wilde’s eulogies’ despite the fact that Louÿs ‘was not and was not meant to become a homosexual’ (52).[7] Such relatively subtle homophobic allusions are enlightened by longer arguments that clarify his point of view as to creativity and sexuality. For instance, when expounding on Wilde’s ‘debauched pursuit of new lovers’ (31),[8] Lottman asserts that ‘it did not undermine his enthusiasm for creation’ (31-32).[9] Not only does the author seem to be completely unaware of Wilde’s aesthetic and vital hedonism but also he projects a dubious impression of his sexual activities which are interpreted as the cause of the degradation of the individual. That is why he constantly perceives Wilde’s life as one dominated by ‘vice’ and ‘perversion’, for only the French reactions and response to Wilde’s trial and to his sexual orientation are collected. No hint of the impact of his plays, prose or poems on the French literary press is ever examined in the book. The author provides instead an assortment of the declarations of Daudet, Adam, Mirbeau or Baüer, either against, or in favour, of the author’s private life, with no attempt to explore the conditions of homophobia or moral hypocrisy amongst the intellectual circles of 1890 Paris.

Therefore, the most controversial aspect of the biography is the author’s projection of a moral condemnation of Wilde’s private life. Lottman’s preoccupation about the playwright’s manliness after his release from prison – as recollected by all those who thought that the incarceration had turned him into a ‘more virile’ and ‘manly’ man (156)[10] – and his consequent consideration of his stay in Reading as a ‘positive’ experience (‘Despite [his being turned into a more virile man], there were some negative consequences’ [resulting from his imprisonment], 156),[11] display a ‘subtle’ moral bias against the author’s sexual orientation, that transparently endorses a number of homophobic clichés and stereotypes. This is confirmed by multiple specifically selected quotes and personal comments that aim at influencing the reader’s expectations. For instance, when proceeding to evoke the beginning of Wilde’s homoerotic practices he nuances the facts by reminding the reader that the poet’s double life was conducted while Wilde and Constance ‘were married’, ‘lived together’ and ‘had two gorgeous children’ (30).[12] Similarly, the ninth chapter starts with a morally dubious assumption equating the North of Africa with homosexual tourism (‘sexual adventures was not the only reason for travelling to North Africa’, 81).[13] Throughout his narrative, Lottman is determined to permeate Wilde’s male relationships with a sense of personal debauchery and to stigmatise Wilde’s sexuality as that of a man who, ‘despite’ being a successful, iconoclastic artist, ‘made a mistake’ (206).[14]

Leaving aside the author’s suspicious personal considerations on Wilde’s sexuality, a number of vague assumptions on his work question the value of his timid attempts to assess his literary career. The clear-cut distinction he often makes between ‘serious’ and ‘comic’ works (14, 210)[15] perpetuates a conventional prejudice against comedy as a superficial and commercial genre, and erases Wilde’s notable skills as a public entertainer and social satirist. This inability to perceive Wilde’s encompassing of amusement and philosophical abstraction in his theatre leads the biographer to totally ignore the latter and to reflect upon the former as a debased spectacular diversion. Moreover, the Irishman’s eccentricity is not examined in the light of his aesthetic and moral dandyism – thus reproducing Beau Brummell’s and Baudelaire’s reflections on the utility of art against philistinism – nor is it explored as a token of Wilde’s fervent ultra-English nationalism (McCormack, 1998). Instead, both his style and his provocative attitude are depicted as a demonstration of futile extravagance (78)[16] that fatally led to the trials.

More serious mistakes or understatements are to be observed when dealing with real people or names, that weaken the accuracy of the data collected. In this sense, it is particularly noticeable the author’s allusion to ‘a certain Lord Chamberlain’ (60),[17] whose identity is not only not known but also mistakenly taken, either by the author or by the translator. Neither of them seems to know that Chamberlain is not a family name. The lightness of the research conducted by Lottman in order to unveil who the Lord Chamberlain was and the role he played in the banning of Wilde’s play Salomé, reveals the biographer’s unawareness of the internal composition of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office and of his function as an institutional authority monitoring every play that was to be performed in London since the passing of the Walpole Act. The French and the Spanish editions are particularly unsatisfactory on this subject, as both translators – probably following the author’s original text – omitted the use of the definite article ‘the’ before the official title when referring to the chief officer of theatrical censorship in London. Thus we read in the French version some excerpts such as ‘été sous le contrôle étroit des censeurs et [sic] un certain Lord Chamberlain était responsable (...) du comportement des acteurs...’ (65), ‘les reîtres de Lord Chamberlain...’ (65), and later on ‘voilà la pièce écrite (...) dont Lord Chamberlain a refusé la représentation publique’ (72). The Spanish version reproduces the same mistake and mentions the Chamberlain’s title as identical to that of another British Lord: ‘un tal Lord Chamberlain era responsible...’ (60),[18] ‘los esbirros de Lord Chamberlain’ (61),[19] ‘cuya representación pública ha desautorizado Lord Chamberlain’ (67).[20]

In this respect, it is important to note that the Spanish edition is a translation from the French version, rather than from the English one, as it is acknowledged in the paratextual information provided by the editor. Yet, a contrastive analysis of both texts gives away a number of (hopefully) typographical errors permeating the Spanish edition (‘Walter Peter’) which are also to be found in the French one and could have been avoided had the translator resorted to the original text.

To conclude, it is undeniable that many of the remarks suggested above could be refuted by assuming that the author was ‘merely’ attempting a biography of Oscar Wilde, instead of a historiographic essay on fin de siècle Paris or a comparative study of the aesthetics of homosexuality in the last decade of the nineteenth century in England and in France. That his aim was not to write a methodic, well-documented piece of work we can be sure. Lottman’s biography resembles those booklets assembling a list of quotations of Wilde’s wit for beginners or tourists, in which no opinion from the compiler is ever shown. Not even, as Whistler would have noted, the courage of the opinion of others! Except for a range of dull sexual anecdotes – which unfortunately are not in the least piquant or saucy enough to stimulate either our most lurid curiosity or to provide any gossipy and valuable information on Wilde’s private life – Lottman’s views on Wilde are absent from the narrative: no insight into his art or into his personality is undertaken. Indeed, as said, Lottman’s objective was not to carry out an academic study on Wilde and France, but he did not mean to write a canonic literary biography of a well-known author either. His unnecessary and unsystematic digressions and incorporation of modern facts – the references to contemporary currency are rather gratuitous – and his arbitrary use of the notes deprive the work of any aura of biographic methodology to the point that, after being bombarded by the author’s perennial personal intrusions in the narrative, one is tempted to ask oneself whose biography we are reading. If a literary biography is to allow a consideration of the artistic value of the individual with a set of cultural, socio-political and aesthetic processes, Lottman’s work does not fulfil the demands either of literature or of historiography. Alas, a good chance to analyse France as a private cultural icon of Wilde’s singular life and aesthetics has been missed.

v Dr. Ignacio Ramos Gay is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, in Spain, where he teaches English and French literature. His research areas include contemporary comparative drama and the aesthetics of drama reception. His doctoral research centred on the theatrical cross-currents between France and Victorian England, and he is the author of a monograph on the impact of French ‘minor’ genres on Oscar Wilde’s dramaturgy Oscar Wilde y el teatro de boulevard francés. Valencia: Universidad de Valencia, 2007). He is currently preparing a book on the influence of French plays and adaptations on the renaissance of English drama.

Bibliography

Bancroft, Marie Effie, Lady and Sir Squire Bancroft (1925). Empty chairs. London: John Murray.

Beckson, Karl (1970). The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Clayworth, Anya (Ed) (2004). Oscar Wilde. Selected Journalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Clive, H.P. (1970). ‘Oscar Wilde first meeting with Mallarmé’. French Studies, 24 (1970): 145-149.

Cook, H. L. ‘French Sources of Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray’. The Romanic Review. no 19 (1928): 25-34.

Douglas, Lord Alfred (1914). Oscar Wilde and Myself. London: John Long.

Ellman, Richard (1987). Oscar Wilde. London: Penguin.

Eltis, Sos (1996). Revising Wilde. Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde. Oxford: Clarendon Press

Guy, Josephine M. (1998). ‘Self-Plagiarism, creativity and craftmanship in Oscar Wilde’. English Literature in Transition (1880-1920). 41:1, 1998:1, 6-23.

Harris, Frank (1965). Oscar Wilde. His Life and Confessions. Londres: Panther Books.

Hartley, Kelver (1935). Oscar Wilde. L’Influence Française dans son Œuvre. Paris : Librairie du Reccueil Sirey.

Hyde, H. Montgomery (1976). Oscar Wilde. London: Eyre Methuen.

Lottman, Herbert (2009). Oscar Wilde en París. Barcelona: Tusquets.

--- (2007). Oscar Wilde à Paris. Paris: Fayard.

Macfarlane, Robert (2007). Original Copy. Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McCormack, J. (Ed) (1998). Wilde the Irishman. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Mikhail, E.H. (1968). ‘The French Influences on Oscar Wilde’s Comedies’. Revue de Littérature Comparée, 42, 220-233.

Morley, Sheridan (1976). Oscar Wilde. An Illustrated Biography. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Pearson, Hesketh (1946). Oscar Wilde. New York: Grosset.

Powell, Kerry (1990). Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890’s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Raafat, Zeinab M. (1970). The Influence of Scribe and Sardou upon English Dramatists. Doctoral Dissertation, University of London.

Ramos Gay, Ignacio (2007). Oscar Wilde y el teatro de boulevard francés. Valencia: Universidad de Valencia.

Robson, Julie-Ann (2005). ‘Oscar Wilde and Intertextuality’, Irish Studies Review, 13: 3 (2005), 353-358.

Saint-Amour, Paul K. (2000). ‘Oscar Wilde: orality, Literary property and Crimes of Writing’. Nineteenth-Century Literature, 55: 1 (2000), 59–91.

Schwarz, H. S. (1933). ‘The Influence of Dumas fils on Oscar Wilde’. The French Review. vol 3. (1933), 5-25.

Souffrin, Eileen (1959). ‘La Rencontre de Wilde et Mallarmé’, Revue de Littérature Comparée, 33 (1959), 529-535.

Stokes, John (1978). Oscar Wilde. Harlow: Longman / The British Council.

Tufescu, Florina (2008). Oscar Wilde’s Plagiarism. The Triumph of Art over Ego. Dublin, Portland: Irish Academic Press.

Wood, Julia (2007). The Resurrection of Oscar Wilde: A Cultural Afterlife. Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press.

Wright, Thomas (2008). Oscar’s Books. London: Chatto & Windus.

v Reviews at www.oscholars.com of the French edition of this book are by Marie-Noelle Zeender (THE OSCHOLARS 35-41 April/September 2007) and Lou Ferreira (RUE DES BEAUX ARTS 10 September/October 2007).

Review by Jane Desmarais (Goldsmiths College, University of London)

SALOMÉ : NOT WILDE, BUT DANGEROUS

Salomé, dir. Jamie Lloyd, Hampstead Theatre, London. 22nd June- 17th July 2010.

The current production of Salomé at the Hampstead Theatre in London brings Wilde’s tragic drama into the edgy and youthful contemporary world. The stage-set is a giant sandpit filled with black sand, surrounded by gymnasium bars on which the lighting is rigged. At the centre is a giant drain cover, which is lifted dramatically to reveal the enchained and grimacing Jokanaan. The atmosphere is dark and sulphurous and the characters prowl and rage around the space in combat gear. This is not Herod’s palace but Unhappy Families on the Gaza Strip, and the interpretation of Wilde’s drama is played out as a kind of cross between a television soap-opera and Apocalypse Now. The actors spit and shout their lines, and the complex relationships between Herod, Herodias, Salomé and Jokanaan are presented as dysfunctional, infantile, and sexually violent. Herod and Herodias stagger on to the stage reeling drunk, while Salomé pouts and struts and shows off to the medley of young male characters dangling from the gym bars. The steady bass drum beat of modern techno music thuds away in the opening scenes and only stops for the beating of the wings of the Angel of Death (never has the Angel of Death been more welcome).

Jamie Lloyd’s production with the Headlong Theatre and Curve Theatre is arresting and disturbing, bringing out from Wilde’s drama contemporary anxieties about racial and sexual boundaries that are overstepped and broken for the sake of personal gain. The production wilfully loses Wilde’s imprint, investing the decadent symbolism (the moon, the blood, the water) in the stage setting rather than in the language, which is used to create strong meaning rather than suggest abstractions. The description of Salomé early on, for example, as the ‘shadow of a white rose in mirror of silver’, is delivered as a hesitant rap on her beauty, while the line ‘one must not find symbols in everything one sees’ has no purchase given the lack of emphasis on symbolic language throughout. What we have are real modern relationships. Herod is a leering, masturbating step-father indiscriminately revelling with both his wife and her daughter; Herodias is a drunk and irresponsible mother; Salomé is petulant teenager who conveys her desires through stamping and wanking; while Jokanann is a prisoner of war, dragged brutally like a terror suspect from his underground prison.

All of which might sound like an indictment of the play and its director. Far from it. The individual performances are excellent. Zawe Ashton (Salomé) gives a disturbing performance as a girl on the brink of womanhood, striking sexual poses that merely serve to reveal her teen age, captured brilliantly in the Dance. She strides on to the stage with a boom-box and a pink wig to dance the dance that Herod requires. She is, at this moment, both club dancer and little girl, reminiscent – for those who have children – of the English children’s TV character, Stephanie, from Lazy Town. Con O’Neill gives a physical and brutish performance as Herod, inebriated, foolish, weak but also bullying and intransigeant. His is power without conviction or responsibility, counterpointed by his wife Herodias, played by Jaye Griffiths, another superb, disturbing performance that unsettles by its lack of inhibition and cruelty. The possibility that utter mayhem might ensue with this family in power is cleverly present throughout and much of it is uncomfortable to watch. Seun Shote (Jokanaan) gives the only performance that is recognizably from Wilde’s drama. His delivery is authoritative and prophetic and he is complemented by the male actors in the minor roles – Richard Cant as the Page of Herodias, Vyelle Croom as Naaman, Sam Donovan as the Young Syrian, Nitzan Sharron as the Cappadocian, Tom Byam Shaw as the Nazarene, and Tim Steed as the Jew – all worth mentioning as they remain on stage throughout, as refractions and reflections of the unbridled greed, desire and nihilistic instincts of the royal family from Hell.

The brochure makes much of its Wildean origins, providing a brief history of the play and a time-line, but one would be forgiven for not being able to identify the play’s author from the production. The atmosphere is apocalyptic rather than decadent, Salomé is less mythical femme fatale than pole-dancer, and the ‘beautiful, coloured musical thing’ that Wilde envisaged in his play is transformed into its negative.

v For a short video clip, see http://www.hampsteadtheatre.com/page/3031/Salomé/90.

v Jane Desmarais (Goldsmiths’, University of London) is completing A Cultural History of Decadence for Polity Press, and A Decadence Reader (co-edited with Chris Baldick) for Manchester University Press. She is also writing Flowers of Evil for Reaktion Press (forthcoming in 2012), a study of the metaphor of the hot-house flower in the literature, art and film of the late 19th century to the present day.

Review by Koenraad Claes (University of Ghent)

The Importance of Being Earnest

English Theatre Company, Tinnenpot Theatre Ghent, 24th March 2010

The occasional visiting troupe from Britain or the United States notwithstanding, English-speaking theatre is as rare a treat in Belgium as it probably is anywhere on the Continent, and when we do get it, it usually involves the eternal Shakespeare, or rarely more modern drama that the companies feel would suffer excessively from an attempt at translation. Even though transferring Wilde to another language, or perhaps even another jargon than his typical style of late-Victorian English, is probably as daunting a task; there have been various stagings of his plays in Dutch or French over the past century. Performing Wilde in the original, however, is never a walk in the park either. To give but the example of Earnest, only recently performed in Ghent by Flemish students of English, the four star roles, being those of ‘Jack’, Algernon, Gwendolen and Cecily, require suave delivery, a ready command of smugness and smirks, and a degree of self-confidence in the English language many native speakers would not be able to muster.

It is to the immense credit of the young and largely inexperienced actors, to many of whom this was even their maiden performance, that they succeeded on all counts. Special praise is due to Karlien Lowie for her sweetly capricious Gwendolen Fairfax. Simon Bequoye (Jack/Ernest) inevitably had to cope with the mixed blessing of playing the demanding title role, which has the least zesty lines and therefore occasionally gets upstaged by others, but he played the tormented lover quite endearingly. The interpretation of the supporting parts, which rely on a delicate balance of graceful social parody ever in danger of tipping over towards either the bland or the ridiculous, was overall satisfactory as well, and never failed to entertain an enthusiastic audience. The amateur professionalism of this young cast and dedicated production team is doubly to be admired, considering the small yet bothersome setbacks which have beset their project from day one. The less than ideal location they had to settle for, with its uncomfortable wooden benches arranged in a semicircle, fortunately turned out to be not overly distracting. Besides, it is undoubtedly easier to keep your audience on the edge of their seats when there is hardly any seating to begin with; although we must admit that the lady who elegantly swooned during the second act was probably not solely overcome with the undeniable charm of Algernon (Régis Dragonetti), or the sweltering glances of Cecily (Sofie Hoflack).

This production was meant as a renewal of the tradition of excellent English student theatre at Ghent University which, until it went into hibernation some twenty years ago, usually focussed on Shakespeare due to the involvement of Renaissance specialists. Its primary aim, now as it was then, is to encourage students to develop a more than plainly academic interest in English literature, and subsequently, its funds are rather limited. A shortage of convincing props and costume from the late nineteenth century prompted a modest rewriting of the text, that should have changed the setting to an unspecified time somewhere in the first half of the twentieth century. This is of course very tricky with a play like this one, that is so very much a ‘period’ piece, and it never works as effortlessly as merely changing a few dates and having Algernon play a swing jazz melody at the beginning of the first act , instead of a more Victorian strain. A more thorough revising would indeed have been opportune, but for all ends and purposes, this was a great performance, and very good fun.

v Koenraad Claes is Belgian Editor of THE OSCHOLARS.

Review by Aoife Leahy (THE OSCHOLARS)

Dublin Gay Theatre Festivals 2009 and 2010

There were three plays that were based on Wilde’s life or work in the 2009 International Gay Theatre Festival. Plays tended to be quite short and were usually performed in relatively small venues, with imaginative use of the available space.

The Happy Prince, performed at the Outhouse Theatre by the Peculius Stage Company Durham, is an adaptation of Wilde’s short story for children. The first part of the play is an amusing commentary on what kind of dramas are considered to be suitable for children in the twenty-first century. The petulant Happy Prince, who is still alive as the play begins, declines to sponsor any performances that refer to sadness or death. He also refuses to know about anything unpleasant that may be happening in the world outside of his palace. When he dies and becomes a statue, he is forced to make reparation to the people that he decided to ignore during his lifetime. This is a considerable departure from Wilde’s story, which implies that the Happy Prince dies when he is too young and innocent to know anything about the world. The play works well, however, in pointing out that some of Wilde’s stories may be withheld from today’s children because of their acknowledgement of suffering and death. In overcoming his initial selfishness, this adaptation’s Happy Prince is also reminiscent of the Selfish Giant.

Leslie Clack’s More Lives than One: Oscar Wilde and the Black Douglas was performed in a beautiful Georgian room in the Cobalt Café and is a good example of a performance working well in a limited space. Although Leslie Clack has also given this show in large venues, the intimate space on this occasion allowed the Theatre Festival audience to feel that we were in a drawing room listening to Wilde’s words. There are many extracts from Wilde’s plays, from The Picture of Dorian Gray, from his poetry, from his letter De Profundis, and from his trial. The show is a very helpful introduction to Wilde for audience members who know little about his life, but it is equally successful as an interpretation of Wilde for others. It is interesting that Clack chooses to perform the French version of Salomé for English speaking audiences, for instance.

The Independent Theatre Ensemble Indiana performed The Picture (of Dorian Gray) in the New Theatre. The play begins with the premise of three young American actors rehearsing a stage adaptation of Wilde’s novel. As a gay man, a closeted bisexual man and a woman who are in a love triangle, they find themselves identifying with various characters in Dorian Gray. The actors switch quickly from one role to another, revealing new facets of their own personalities in the process. This was an interesting way of updating the Dorian Gray story while still retaining Wilde’s original words. In performing Dorian Gray, the actors investigate what it means to be a beautiful person, the perils of partying too much, and the fragility of life. There is even a joke about Britney Spears and her short lived days of carefree youth. Eventually the rehearsals take over the actors’ lives and result in the tragic death of one of the trio.

Another play in the 2009 festival at the New Theatre venue, writer-director Martin Lewton’s Lord Arthur’s Bed, examined the legacy of a famous Victorian court case. The prosecution of the drag queens Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park was the scandal of 1870, particularly in relation to Boulton’s romantic relationship with Lord Arthur Clinton. As Neil Bartlett has pointed out in Who Was that Man, Wilde knew of the case and it was a significant influence on his work. Donald (Spencer Charles Noll) and Jim (Paul Spruce), the protagonists of Lord Arthur’s Bed, stumble upon a historical link between their home and the Boulton and Park case. Fascinated, they act out the roles of the key figures in the case. Jim is happiest to act out the parts of judge, policeman and other figures of authority. In doing so, he begins to recognise his destructive internalised homophobia. His civil partner Donald favours the drag queens and other figures of rebellion, celebrating the need to ‘flaunt’ one’s sexuality. If we are afraid to be outrageous now and again, Martin Lewton suggests, it is only because we are agents in our own repression. Jim’s desire to conform at all costs will ruin his relationship, unless he can learn from the courage of Victorian drag queens. Lewton convincingly shows that the past always shapes the present: we should remember Boulton and Park, just as we remember Wilde.

2010

In 2009, the already well established International Gay Theatre Festival was sponsored by Absolut Vodka for the first time. In 2010, however, there were two separate festivals running at the same time in Dublin: the International Gay Theatre Festival and the Absolut Gay Theatre Festival. According to the Irish magazine Gay Community News, the split occurred because of a disagreement about sponsorship. Happily, Wilde was represented in both festivals.

In the Absolut festival, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crimes (plural) at the Boys School, Smock Alley Theatre is Martin Harris’ very successful adaptation of Wilde’s short story ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime.’ As a long married and mature man Lord Arthur (Martin Harris) welcomes the audience as his dinner guests for the evening and tells us about his youthful crisis. With the aid of his faithful butler (James Anning) and with the participation of one or two surprised members of the audience, Lord Arthur recalls his various attempts to commit murder. The adaptation retains the plot of the short story but is also made entirely suitable for the stage with the clever interaction between cast and audience members. My theatre companion was directed onto the stage as the Duchess of Paisley and had her palm read according to the principles of chiromancy. It was a very enjoyable evening.

In the International Gay Theatre Festival, Martin Williamson’s Oh What a Wilde Wardrobe! guides the audience through Wilde’s life story with reference to his favourite clothes. Williamson frequently changes clothes onstage behind a screen, humorously commenting on the importance of being well dressed. The costumes look accurate in every detail and are just as they appear in the most famous photographs of Wilde. Williamson is very adept at delivering the quips that were as outrageous as Wilde’s clothes. The performance is funny and tragic in turn; Wilde’s prison uniform is a sharp contrast to his usual outfits. As with the Cobalt Cafe and 2009’s More Lives than One, a lovely Georgian room in the James Joyce Centre makes a highly appropriate setting for Oh What a Wilde Wardrobe!

v Aoife Leahy is THE OSCHOLARS Ireland Editor.

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[1] From now onwards, I provide within the text of the article a free translation in English by myself, together with the Spanish translation by Javier Albiñana in note: [parece pecar de ingenuo en sus percepciones, lo que cabe achacar a su falta de experiencia. Observa y anota lo que sucede ante él como mejor puede, pero le falta perspectiva y experiencia, se echan de menos comparaciones con otros lugares, otras personas, otros tiempos’].

[2] [Decepcionante].

[3] [Por lo menos había hecho lo que tenía que hacer].

[4] [Alcanzó el ‘placer’ cinco veces con Mohammed ].

[5] [Durante toda aquella noche se siguió hablando del Tema con T mayúscula. Como relató Goncourt ; « Todo el mundo quiere saber si Wilde es activo o pasivo, y alguien declara que debe ser pasivo, porque, como pasivo, el hombre halla en la pederastia el placer que no disfruta con la mujer].

[6] [Amiguitos], [regalitos], [el más extraño de aquellos personajes].

[7] [Pese a no ser homosexual ni estar destinado a serlo].

[8] [Desenfrenada búsqueda de nuevos amantes].

[9] [No menoscababa su entusiasmo por la creación, ni le impedía hablar en público].

[10] [La cárcel (…) le había hecho más viril. Sherard lamentó no poder sacarle una foto en ese momento para que la gente viera, en Inglaterra, « que en él hay un hombre.]

[11] [Así y todo, había también señales negativas]. The author implicitly understands therefore that Sherard’s consideration of Wilde as a more virile man was a positive assumption.

[12] [Mientras todo esto sucedía, Oscar y Constance seguían casados, vivían juntos, y tenían dos soberbios hijos]

[13] [No por fuerza se viajaba en busca de aventuras sexuales cuando se visitaba África del norte en la época de la colonización francesa].

[14] [Se equivocó].

[15] [La Duquesa de Padua er auna obra seria], [le había comprado (…) los derechos del guión de una obra seria].

[16] [Le permitían sus extravagancias].

[17] [Un tal Lord Chamberlain].

[18] [A certain Lord Chamberlain was responsible for…]

[19] [Lord Chamberlain’s henchmen].

[20] [Here it is the written version of the play (…) the public performance of which has been banned by Lord Chamberlain].