The Importance of Being Oscar at the Park Theatre – review

What’s perhaps most interesting about The Importance of Being Oscar, first performed at Dublin’s Gate Theatre in 1960, is the context in which it was created. Actor, director, writer and designer Michéal Mac Liammóir (1899-1978), who idolised Oscar Wilde, was an Englishman who adopted an Irish identity and was openly gay in a country where homosexuality remained illegal until 1994.

Wilde remained a controversial figure through much of the 20th century, especially in his native (Catholic, conservative) Ireland. This sympathetic one-man show was broadcast on RTÉ and must have played a considerable role in his rehabilitation.

Michael Fentiman’s production has previously been performed at Jermyn Street Theatre and on tour, and the piece is less of a play than an “entertainment” or dramatic lecture in which performer Alastair Whatley takes us on a whistle-stop tour through Wilde’s life and career.

There’s nothing new here for acolytes, and it’s doubtful that it would be the best introduction to Wilde’s life and work for newcomers due to its density and lack of emotional reflection (personally, I like most of Wilde’s work, but I don’t hero–worship him). It runs at nearly two hours with an interval when, really, no solo show ought to be longer than a brisk 70 minutes, in my opinion.

Dressed in a burnt-orange corduroy suit, the dapper if rather aloof Whatley doesn’t deliver an impression of Wilde but a recital of his greatest hits (a remarkable feat of memorisation), bookended with brief extracts from Mac Liammóir’s recording of the show. Madeleine Girling’s minimalist disc-shaped set design features a circular ring of light and a lamp with a base representing two figures in a clinch.

Apparently, leaving Ireland for England (Oxford, then London) was the only time in his life in which Wilde followed the crowd. He had a rather public crush on actress and royal mistress Lillie Langtry, and, through the florid verses that he dedicated to her, we can see why he isn’t known for his early poetry. He married Constance Lloyd and they had two sons; he penned a series of hit comedies and became the embodiment of the decadent 1890s. Then his relationship with the beautiful but horrid Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, son of the vengeful Marquess of Queensbury, brought everything crashing down.

The show is dominated by lengthy set pieces from Wilde’s works. The first half features the interview between Jack Worthing and his mother-in-law-to-be Lady Bracknell from The Importance of Being Earnest. The second half features passages from “De Profundis”, his letter to Bosie in which he identifies with Jesus Christ, and the unadorned poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, both of which are performed movingly by Whatley and bring much-needed emotion to the proceedings (Wilde is often charged with artifice, and this piece is nothing if not artificial).

Wilde died in poverty and exile at the age of 46. At the time of Mac Liammóir’s first performance, the tragedy eclipsed the triumph, but now the tables have turned. A collector’s item for Wilde connoisseurs and a moderately entertaining evening for everyone else.