THE DEPTHS BELOW THE WIT
The plays, ever revived, we know well; the wit is often cited, the old injustice of his downfall recreated in plays and films: most recently we’ve seen him played by Stephen Fry and (infinitely better) Rupert Everett. Micheal MacLiammoir’s 1960 one-man show, rich in Wilde’s own writings, is not that often revived, and is in many ways more serious about him, reflecting both his lush, honeyed romantic emotional imagination and the way that far beneath the wit, irony and poses his thought on human life and relationships developed . Alastair Whatley of Original Theatre is someone I have seen mostly as a director and driving force in his company, but this intense, two-hour rendering of the McLiammoir text (prefaced by a brief tribute) feels like something deeply personal and deliberately enigmatic.
Mike Fentiman, directing, underlines this in the programme but it’s perceivable in the downbeat, gripping seriousness of the performance. “Diving into the wit, the mischief and the sorrow”, he stands framed in a simple circular neon light, which effectively reminds us all the time of the deep black darkness beyond. There’s no showing off, no costuming, just a green carnation – finally thrown aside – to remind us of his 1890 dandyish flowering, wht age of “Fashion is what one wears oneself”, of Lady Windermere and the foppish Goring, and the yearning worship of The Picture of Dorian Gray . His rendering of the account of the portrait’s decline is mesmerizing. staring into the round black dark behind him. Coming to The IMportance of Being Earnest Whatley does of course deliver a splendid Lady Bracknell. And then a harrumphing Queensberry and a judge pronouncing the immense absurdity of how very, very terrible was the sin of sodomy.
But the strong core of the show is something we hear far, far less of in memorials to him: the long, long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas from Reading Jail titled De Profundis. I have never heard this delivered at such length before; after his line at the trial “May I say nothing?” its reflective outpouring is immense.
So, even more intensely, is Whatley’s perfect delivery of the Ballad of Reading Jail, which Wilde wrote in Naples before his final end in Paris. The simple, unromantic, straightforward and profound human pity of it shakes you down, as it has done generations, from the exercise yard to the pit of shame, the tragedy of love and death.
jermynstreettheatre.co.uk to 12 April
And STREAMING – at which Original Theatre is a pioneer – www.originaltheatre.com
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