The Importance of Being Oscar, Jermyn Street Theatre review - Wilde, still burning bright

It’s a greater accolade than a Nobel Prize for Literature – one’s very own adjective. There’s a select few: Shakespearean; Dickensian and Pinteresque. Add to that list, Wildean. 

That’s all the more remarkable in the light of Oscar Wilde’s personal ruin in the years leading up to his death, aged 46, ostracised from London, self-exiled in Paris. And that reputational recovery is no recent occurrence, no reclaiming of a martyred icon in these more enlightened times (though it is), but predates the remarkable social changes of the last two decades. Wilde’s rehabilitation rested solely on the quality of his work, his wonderful poetry, delightful stories and endlessly revived, much loved comedies of manners. Almost at the midpoint between now and his interment at Père Lachaise Cemetery, Micheál MacLiammóir, whose own life was rather Wildean in its confident transgressive self-invention, wrote The Importance of Being Oscar, staged in London for the first time in 25 years. It could hardly be more timely.

Alastair Whatley is our one man in this one-man show, lean when Oscar was bulky, English when Oscar was Irish, 21st century when Oscar was 19th. But Whatley captures the essential otherness of his subject, the charisma that insisted on one’s eye, the small movements that mean so much in so intimate a space. This is no biopic style impersonation, no showy conjuring of the man back to life for us to ogle, no display of camp cavorting that would diminish a gay icon. Instead, in keeping with its writing in the late 1950s when the love that dare not speak its name was still barely whispered outside bohemian circles, Wilde is resurrected through his words – after all, they say plenty, and Whatley speaks them beautifully. 

We learn of his brilliance at Oxford, his entry, like a starburst, into London Society, his lecture tour of America, his love affairs and accompanying histrionics, his marriage and children, his catastrophic and cruel downfall. Some of this fascinating narrative (even when you know it in pretty much every detail) is delivered almost conversationally, director Mike Fentiman keeping the production low key all the better to allow the words to carry the weight they deserve. The exception is in Chris Davey’s lighting, bold and bright, perfectly judged to illuminate a man who defines the adjective dazzling perhaps better than any Londoner before or since.

We hear his verse, the early works overflowing with Sondheimian internal rhymes and melting metaphors. We hear his coruscating wit, its barbs not always tipped with venom but it’s hardly difficult to see how easily he made enemies of those less blessed, the juvenile and the jealous. We hear extracts from the celebrated plays and it’s revelatory to receive them straight, as t’were, free of today’s modish pantomime line readings borne of their culturally embedded familiarity. 

In the second half, when the monde exacts its revenge on the demi-monde by chopping down its tallest poppy, the words change. Of course they retain their power, but they’re now in the service of self-therapy, but not its cousin, self-pity, still defiantly true to their writer. We’re with the broken man in his Reading Gaol cell and, movingly, at Clapham Junction railway station in handcuffs displayed for public ridicule. Its impact is achieved not via theatrical trompe l'oeil, but through the power of that occasionally poisonous always powerful pen, resonating across almost 130 years.

It’s a tough watch at times – maybe it should be, but maybe it’s necessary too. Legal and extra-legal processes are being used right now to persecute and deport men and women from the USA for words and deeds deemed threatening to the state, such transgressions simply too much for the insecure cabal of arrested development sufferers in charge to bear. And if you think that’s not coming here any time soon, the Vice-President has a message. You can find him, speaking loudly and carrying a big stick.

• The Importance of Being Oscar at Jermyn Street Theatre until 19 April
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