The importance of being Oscar was a very moving and intense production. Alastair Whatley gave the show his absolute all, it was part storytelling and part poetry recital, part humour, part sadness…overall it really worked and brought Oscar’s life so vividly to the stage, the audience were captivated. I hadn’t known much about Oscar’s life and how turbulent it had been during one episode. I think a show like this is great for educating people and it certainly taught me so much I hadn’t heard before. Here is a little bit about Oscar.
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish playwright, poet, novelist, and critic famed for his wit, epigrams, and role in the Aesthetic movement. He relocated to London in early adulthood, He is often referred to as an English writer, and these days he is regarded as a national treasure in both countries. Shakespeare apart, he is, without doubt, the most quoted of writers in the English language. He had a unique mind – one that couldn’t help applying a cynical tongue to just about everything he saw and heard. And always amusing, while being thought-provoking. He is celebrated for works like The Picture of Dorian Gray and comedies including The Importance of Being Earnest, and became one of late-Victorian London’s most popular dramatists. His 1895 conviction for gross indecency led to imprisonment and exile in France, where he died in 1900.
Even on his deathbed, he couldn’t help it. As his life was ending in a cheap bed in a rundown French pension the poverty-stricken Wilde, according to friends attending his death, looked around the shabby room, and said: ‘My wallpaper and I are in a battle to the death, one or the other must go.’
Many of Oscar Wilde’s observations, taken from his writing and his reported conversations and speeches, have become common currency in the modern English language. Such quotes as, ‘I can resist everything except temptation’; ‘Work is the curse of the drinking class’; ‘There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about’, and the more sober, ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’, have become common sayings.
What I didn’t know much about was his time spent in prison and with vastly different attitudes towards sexuality in Victorian times his traumatic experience and treatment during this time by members of the public. Even his own sons changed their surnames because of the scandal.
The show really was very compelling and I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone, a fantastic night in theatre!
The run at Darlington Hippodrome is from 14th-16th July and is showing at many venues do check out the shows website for more information.
I’m Cassie, a mum of 3, (most of the time I haven’t had chance to straighten my hair or drink a hot cup of tea) trying to juggle life as we all are and failing some of the time, but try and see my glass as half full!