The Importance of Being Oscar
Micheal Mac Liammoir
Original Theatre & Reading Rep Theatre
Jermyn Street Theatre
Star rating: 3
Photograph by Marc Brenner
Liammoir’s sombre 1960 play is a biography of Oscar Wilde presented by a single actor: Alastair Whatley is this calm, arguably understated, revival.
Wearing a gorgeous burnt orange three piece velvet suit (costume and set design by Madeleine Girling) Whatley unfolds the life of Wilde in the third person and impersonates him, quite gently, as the story unfolds. We meet the colourful camp man who couldn’t wait to leave Ireland, writes poetry, marries, becomes a successful playwright, fathers two sons, gets into relationships with young men and is eventually imprisoned for homosexuality. Whatley also depicts other characters such as the judge who sentenced Wilde.
The emphasis is on Wilde’s writing and the text includes, among other things, quite long extracts from The Importance of Being Earnest, De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol along with a semi-dramatisation of The Portrait of Dorian Grey. Whatley makes them funny or moving as required and Chris Davey’s imaginative lighting helps to heighten the mood especially during De Profundis.
There is, however, almost no dramatic tension in the mix. I understood (mainly from Richard Ellman’s excellent 1987 biography) that the two years of hard labour Wilde was sentenced to was what broke his health and caused his early death. But it is made nothing of in this play. Wilde was devastated to have all contact with his children severed and although it is mentioned, it too could perhaps be made more of.
Sensitively directed by Michael Fentiman, this play is interesting, if low-key, and it’s fun to hear all those familiar Wildean aphorisms worked in (“I have nothing to declare but my genius”). Whatley, moreover, is a competent actor who inhabits the role and is to be congratulated on an astonishing feat of memorisation. This play runs for over 100 minutes in two halves and must be very demanding to do.
It’s a pleasing enough show in its way but it isn’t likely to set many fires alight.
