Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me! Or in the case of the self-proclaimed “lord of language” Oscar Wilde, “ruin and public infamy” after being sentenced to two years imprisonment for “gross indecency”. An action prompted by his miscalculated decision to proceed with “absurd legal action” against the Marquess of Queensberry, father of “Bosie”, with whom he shared a fiery relationship involving the then-crime of what the Marquess scribbled on the back of his calling card: “posing sodomite”
“I blame myself,” howls the master craftsman Simon Callow as he reprises his role in Frank McGuinness’s sterling adaptation of Wilde’s “jailhouse shock” De Profundis (“from the depths”), first performed at the Vaudeville Theatre earlier in the year as part of Classic Spring Theatre Company’s inaugural season of “ground-breaking work of proscenium playwrights in the architecture they wrote for”. The first being a year-long celebration of Oscar Wilde under the artistic direction of Dominic Dromgoole.
Distilling Wilde’s 50,000-word defence into a 80-minute cauldron of love and hate, pride and passion, poetry and philosophy, the “blame” which Callow howls of is more aimed at Bosie than himself. A man his equal in standing and education (they both attended Magdalen College, Oxford); but not in age and experience, intellect and artistry, temperament and wit. A gap “too wide” which widened over the course of their caustic relationship to the point that Wilde lost his head and staggered into the shambles of a career-ending court case as “blindingly as an ox”.
Not a phrase to describe Callow’s performance which is masterful. His lips, tongue and teeth employed with clinical precision as he lacerates Wilde’s soul; extracts the cancer within; and sews up the wound with great ease and refinement. Particularly towards the end, when the focus under the direction of Mark Rosenblatt shifts from pain to beauty, suffering to acceptance, invective to philosophy. “Most people are other people,” he drops into conversation like a pebbled tossed into a still pond. “Their lives a mimicry.” A thought which ripples through mind as he delivers Wilde’s parting gift that it is love and “possessing your soul” that counts.
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