Get your own Free HomepageLondon - Nearly 100 years after his death and vilification, Oscar Wilde is suddenly and somewhat surprisingly back in everyone's good graces here, and the object of apparently endless fascination.
Why such regard from the country that famously reviled the Irishman during his life as a bon vivant, poet, playwright and aesthete?
The establishment, it seems, embraced Wilde's plays only insofar as it could tolerate his life, and once that life became bound up with tales of male prostitutes and charges of perversion, even the most elegantly spun epigram could not forestall his premature and despairing end.
As Wilde says in Moises Kaufman's "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde," the piece of theatrical reportage that has become an off-Broadway hit, "One day you'll be ashamed of your treatment of me."
Shame may play its part in the current explosion in Britain of interest in Wilde that includes two new plays and a film about him as well as various television shows, stage revivals and film adaptations of his plays, and what promises to be the fullest museum exhibition of his manuscripts.
Currently in London, one can see Tom Stoppard's "Invention of Love" at the Royal National Theater, in which Wilde makes an 11th-hour appearance (played by Michael Fitzgerald), and the new film biography "Wilde." Liam Neeson opened last week to mixed reviews in a West End run of "The Judas Kiss," the David Hare play about Wilde, that is to travel on to Broadway.
But a collective feeling of guilt by itself cannot explain an intensity of focus surpassing even the recent and similar immersions in Virginia Woolf and the rest of the Bloomsbury group. It's as if Wilde's 46 years had become a sort of Rorschach test, a uniquely English crucible, fusing issues of cultural, national, and sexual identity, from which artists and commentators can extract what they like.
"We do pour into Oscar Wilde a lot of things we want him to have and want him to be," said Stephen Fry, the 40-year-old actor who has the title role in "Wilde," an English film from the director-producer team of "Tom and Viv" that is scheduled to open in the United States on May 1. (The British premiere was on Oct. 16, Wilde's birthday.) "To some, he's a gay martyr. To others, his Irishness is central. There are those who see him as an icon of artistic independence."
Indeed, there are as many Wildes as there are people writing about him. One play, "The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde" by Thomas Kilroy, which had its premiere last fall at the Abbey Theater in Dublin, Ireland, centers on Wilde's widow, Constance.
In "The Invention of Love," Stoppard contrasts the flamboyant Wilde with the terminally repressed A.E. Housman, the English poet and classicist who is the true subject of the play. Wilde is there as a figure of antithesis, Stoppard, said, "someone who crashed in flames at a very young age," while the beloved Housman lived to be 77.
By Hare's own reckoning, "The Judas Kiss," too, is an act of imaginative empathy, not a chronicle of events in the manner of "Gross Indecency."
"I'm effectively saying, 'This is poetry,"' Hare said. "The play's purpose in existing is not really to tell us about Oscar." He said his play bore no relation to his screenplay about Wilde, "Feasting With Panthers," which was never filmed. "Thirty-five million dollars was an awful lot to spend on a tragic gay subject," Hare said, "what's worse, a 19th-century tragic gay subject."
This time, he said, he was drawn to Wilde's life as a way of completing an ad hoc dramatic trilogy that includes "Skylight" and his ongoing West End hit "Amy's View": three plays, he said, "about love and sacrificial love."
Richard Eyre, the former artistic director of the National, is the director of the Stoppard and Hare plays, and he said he had been surprised to find himself working within the space of six months on two plays involving the same literary figure.
"Both Tom and David are heterosexual writers drawn towards a man sort of crucified for his sexuality," he said. "You do feel that, given Wilde's own time, somebody conspicuously not heterosexual is a liberating way of writing about the phenomenon of romantic love, of loving someone hopelessly. Wilde was famously a victim of romantic love."
Indeed, the Wilde allure may simply lie in the appeal to any artist of a life story that involves scandal, doomed romance, a rebel and a fatal flaw: his pursuit of a lawsuit against his lover's fiercely unrepentant father, the Marquess of Queensberry.
"Now we're realizing," Fry said, "that if his art was serious, maybe his life was, too."
Wilde will also live on in other ways. Three separate film adaptations are planned of his 1895 play "An Ideal Husband," which has had renewed prominence since Peter Hall's acclaimed 1992 revival. The play has been on and off the West End, including a visit to Broadway, for more than 1,500 performances.
Oliver Parker, who directed the 1995 film of "Othello," with Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh, said he wanted a June start for his own $11 million adaptation of "The Ideal Husband." A rival $3.5 million version is set to begin filming on May 11, with the co-producer, Zygi Kamasa, touting James Wilby, Peter Ustinov and Amanda Donohoe or Jennifer Ehle as possible cast members; the first-time filmmaker Bill Cartlidge will write and direct.
Not to be outdone, the English clothing designer John Pearse said he had written a contemporary screenplay, set in the United States, of Wilde's "Picture of Dorian Gray," adapted in the very free style of the new film version of "Great Expectations."
Pearse said the $20 million venture was "bubbling along," with Mike Figgis ("Leaving Las Vegas") planning to direct, perhaps as early as the fall. Those who prefer to read Wilde can head in 2000 to the British Library, which is preparing the most complete display yet of his manuscripts and letters.
Amid what one can only call Wilde-mania, can there be too much of a good thing? "It's a bit late in the day," said Alan Bennett, the playwright, who considered a biographical screenplay about Wilde but decided against it. "The battle, as it were, is won. I think I find all this just slightly self-righteous."
Merlin Holland, Wilde's grandson and himself a writer and journalist, said he was "frightened about overexposure, that people will get Oscar sickness and feel there's been a surfeit of him."
But Holland, 52, whose book, "The Wilde Album," is to be published in the United States by Henry Holt on April 7, said he was pleased "that England was finally coming round to the conclusion, and not before time, that the man was an artist as well as a homosexual."
Fry said: "The story of Wilde will always move people of each generation in the same way as the story of Christ or Socrates. He will retain that position as one of the great men of the century."
Wilde
Release Date: May 22
Drama: starring Stephen Fry, Jude Law, and Jennifer Ehle;
directed by Brian Gilbert (Sony Pictures Classics)
As a young man, flamboyant author, playwright, and scathingly funny social critic Oscar Wilde (Fry) married the lovely Constance (Ehle) and sired two sons, before falling hopelessly in love with the pretty but petulant Lord Alfred Douglas (Law). The scandal of their affair landed Wilde in prison, poisoned his relationship with Douglas, damaged his marriage and stifled his creative spirit. Almost a century after his death, Wilde remains a hot ticket as much for his status as a gay-rights icon as for his prose (e.g., The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest). Thankfully, director Gilbert (Tom & Viv) displays all of Wilde's facets in this elegant film, which marries the caustic wisdom of the Irishman's work with the tragic details of his life.
by Janet Maslin
from the NY Times, 5/1/98
Wilde is the kind of film biography that finds Oscar Wilde in an art gallery, thoughtfully weighing the difference between an aging woman and her likeness as a beautiful young girl. His novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is a fait accompli in the very next scene.
As written by Julian Mitchell (Another Country) and directed by Brian Gilbert (Tom and Viv), Wilde has a cursorily informative style that would be perfect for the classroom, if the film didn't also frankly depict Wilde's sexual affairs with fetching young men. As in Tom and Viv, there is the sense that a literary legend has come alive, however tenderly, to teach the audience a sort of lesson.
The lesson of Wilde's courage in the face of intolerance is indeed being widely presented these days, with this film as a broad but effectively intimate portrait. Playing the large dandyish writer with obvious gusto, Stephen Fry looks uncannily like Wilde and presents an edgy mixture of superciliousness and vulnerability.
Though the film suffers a case of quip-lash thanks to its tireless Wildean witticisms ("It's perfectly monstrous the way people say things behind one's back that are absolutely true"), Fry's warmly sympathetic performance finds the gentleness beneath the wit. He conveys the sense of a man at the mercy of forces he cannot control, not least of them his own brittle genius.
In a biography that pays much attention to Wilde's romantic life (and is based on Richard Ellmann's outstanding biography, Oscar Wilde), it's no surprise to find Wilde's beloved Lord Alfred Douglas a riveting figure. As played by Jude Law, whose voluptuous beauty and mocking, boyish petulance gives him a rock star's presence, Bosie Douglas is seen bewitching Wilde from their very first meeting.
Before this, Wilde has been seen as a devoted husband to his wife, Constance (Jennifer Ehle), and a loving father to two sons, though his affair with Robert Ross (Michael Sheen), a family friend, has greatly confused him.
What's best about Wilde, and was also a strong aspect of Tom and Viv, is the effort to understand sacrifice, helplessness and compromise as part of love.
Beginning as Oscar allows himself to be steered into marriage to Constance, who is seen as a dear friend and companion, Wilde watches the author discover both his metier and his sexual destiny. The great success of his plays (Victorian audiences are seen laughing unconvincingly at Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest, as if they weren't actually funny) emboldens him toward public flamboyance, as does everything about his own histrionic nature.
The film watches Victorian heads shake disapprovingly as Oscar and Bosie flirt extravagantly in public places, and it also watches them in private. The film watches faithless, peevish Bosie humiliate his older lover, turning Wilde into a voyeur.
Wilde's trial for gross indecency is not, in this version, an occasion of great rhetoric or high drama. Nor is his stay in Reading Gaol, where the row of prisoners on a treadmill suggests a most unpleasant health club, rendered with great poignancy.
Finally freed along with his famous missive to Bosie ("I call it 'De Profundis,' it comes from the very depths"), he is less moving in dire straits than he was in his prime. Wilde and Fry fare better at shaping an arch, vivid impersonation than in telling a cautionary tale.
Production notes:
WILDE
CAST: Stephen Fry (Oscar Wilde), Jude Law (Lord Alfred Douglas), Vanessa Redgrave (Lady
Speranza Wilde), Jennifer Ehle (Constance Wilde), Gemma Jones (Lady Queensberry), Judy Parfitt
(Lady Mount-Temple), Michael Sheen (Robert Ross), Zoe Wanamaker (Ada Leverson) and Tom
Wilkinson (The Marquess of Queensberry).
Directed by Brian Gilbert; written by Julian Mitchell, based on the book "Oscar Wilde" by Richard Ellmann; director of photography, Martin Fuhrer; edited by Michael Bradsell; music by Debbie Wiseman; production designer, Maria Djurkovic; produced by Marc Samuelson and Peter Samuelson; released by Sony Pictures Classics.
Running time: 116 minutes.
Rating: "Wilde" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes nudity and graphic sexual situations.
By Thelma Adams
from the NY Post, 5/1/98
I'm not wild about Wilde. Oscar's fine, but I'm sure The Picture of Dorian Gray author would have had something awfully witty to say about his martyrdom in Brian Gilbert's ever-so-serious bio-pic.
Fruity, he'd say about Stephen Fry's lumbering performance as The Importance of Being Earnest playwright, elephantine, obvious, terribly tortured, asexual.
Fry's fine as Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse's saintly butler, and he's hilarious in supporting roles, but it's hard labor playing a martyr. Ask Willem Dafoe after The Last Temptation of Christ.
The big cheat about dramas with Wilde as their subject is that they often steal his best lines and rarely add much. It may be convenient for contemporary dramatists to portray the author as a proud victim of society's narrow-mindedness, but what a bloody bore.
Director Gilbert, who got literary with T.S. Eliot in Tom and Viv, and screenwriter Julian Mitchell (Another Country), open their movie with a bogus prologue set in, of all places, a Colorado mine.
Then, amid the luscious interiors of late Victorian London, Gilbert and Mitchell proceed to sap Wilde's life of all apparent drama.
While the story tortures Wilde's pursuit of "the love that dare not speak it's name," it begins with the author's marriage to Constance (the dewy-eyed Jennifer Ehle) and comes to a halt at her graveside years later.
In between, Wilde discovers a taste for boys (sacrificing his own two sons in the process). Like any fool in a French farce, Wilde falls for a pretty face. Therein lies his downfall.
The lust of his life, Lord Alfred Douglas (Jude Law), leads Wilde away from his family and into a damaging libel suit. If anyone could lead someone astray, it's Law (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil), the prettiest young actor since Leonardo DiCaprio.
Wilde's lawsuit backfires. Two years of hard labor for gross indecency follow. Prison sobers up Wilde - but not enough to forget his preening aristocratic popinjay, Lord Alfred.
The fact is, having seen actor Law's bottom from every conceivable angle, it's the most unforgettable aspect of Wilde.
Fry leads strong cast
in story of Oscar's grief
from the Daily News
WILDE. With Stephen Fry, Jude Law, Vanessa Redgrave. Directed by Brian Gilbert. Running time: 116 minutes. At the Paris and the Quad. Rated R.
Wilde is a delightfully acerbic biopic with a heart of unabashed mush. The subject is Oscar Wilde, the flamboyant 19th-century literary wit and author (The Importance of Being Earnest, Salome), whose two years in prison for "the love that dare not speak its name" sucked much of the life from him.
The movie opens on a note as incongruous as the man himself. The dapper, erudite writer (Stephen Fry) is lowered into the inferno of a Colorado coal mine, one unlikely stop along a lecture tour. In the pit awaits an audience of illiterate but beautiful young men.
Back in London, secure in his new marriage and burgeoning renown, Wilde would be seduced, inspired and brought to a new hell by his enduring fascination with such "dear boys," as he called them. His homosexuality dawned somewhat slowly on him, but he made up for lost time - much to the displeasure of Victorian England.
Fry is glorious as Wilde. His fleshy features bespeak a lifetime of indulgence and the softness that cushioned Wilde's bloated ego and sense of entitlement. Jude Law, with the lushly vivid features of an oil portrait, plays the arrogant youth who was the writer's downfall.
The supporting cast is excellent, including Vanessa Redgrave as a stage mother for her genius son; Michael Sheen as Wilde's initial seducer and life-long devotee; crusty Tom Wilkinson as an instrument of vengeance, and Jennifer Ehle as a surprisingly three-dimensional, if neglected, wife.
Wilde's famous epigrams ("Give a man a mask and he'll tell you the truth") are sprinkled liberally throughout Wilde, directed by Brian Gilbert (who has come a long way since Not Without My Daughter). It's a loving portrait of a complicated, surprisingly fragile man. Cinematographer Martin Fuhrer leaches the color from the outdoor scenes to suggest that Wilde was a hothouse flower who bloomed only in certain environments.
from the Dallas Morning News, 6/5/98
by Tom Sime / The Dallas Morning News
Though in most respects it couldn't be more different, Brian Gilbert's handsome biopic Wilde shares a predetermined trajectory similar to that of Titanic.
Like the ship, Oscar Wilde seemed for a time invulnerable. And it's easy to get so swept up in his story, especially as sumptuously rendered as it is here, that the grim, foregone conclusion is momentarily forgotten. But make no mistake: This is a disaster film of a different sort, detailing the combined social and personal follies that kept Wilde out of the 20th century.
Stephen Fry's superb portrayal of the Irish playwright, novelist and essayist is the best Wilde yet to hit the screen, and may also make viewers forget his longtime role of the droll butler in Jeeves and Wooster for British TV (Mr. Fry also played Wilde in an episode of the short-lived 1993 Western series Ned Blessing).
Mr. Fry's look here is ideal: imposing, dark, hungry-eyed. Those eyes betray Wilde's hidden desire from Mr. Fry's first scene, in which Wilde, in the midst of an American lecture tour, visits a Colorado coal mine, and clearly savors the spectacle of rapt, shirtless miners giving him their full attention. The scene, which opens the film with a startling vista of the Old West, sets the tone for the movie's unexpectedly sweeping quality.
The movie downplays Wilde's wit and his work in favor of his psychological and sexual life, which went topsy-turvy several years and two sons after his marriage to wife Constance, who's given a demeanor both steely and dewy by Jennifer Ehle.
Given the era's frequent segregation of the sexes, it's not that hard for the Wildes' friend Robbie Ross (Michael Sheen) to seduce Wilde right under Constance's roof. It's a marvelous scene, with Wilde's response to Ross' advances dissolving from surprise to inevitability.
If only he'd stayed with Robbie. Instead, Wilde falls for Lord Alfred Douglas, brilliantly rendered by Jude Law. He's the very picture of Dorian Gray, the golden but corrupt antihero of Wilde's best-known novel. After a lusty courtship, the younger man, nicknamed "Bosie," keeps Wilde at a calculated distance; their sex life is portrayed as voyeuristic, with the writer watching as Bosie hits the mattress with one male prostitute after another.
There's not much reticence in director Brian Gilbert's depiction of homosexuality; there's a great deal of kissing and nudity, even if the act itself is limited to rhythmic writhing under none-too-discreet sheets.
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