Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde
Daily Telegraph, 24th
March 1999, Charles Spencer
Oscar Wilde once told André Gide that he had put his genius into his life and only his talent into his work. It’s a great line, though not quite true. ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ is the greatest high comedy in the English language and likely to remain so for as long as people keep going to the theatre.
Nevertheless, time has been unkind to much of
Wilde’s writing, particularly the embarrassing purple passages of lush,
art-for-art’s sake excess, while his life describes the perfect arc of
classical tragedy.
Here was a great man brought low by a tragic flaw,
his consuming love for a worthless man and his reckless appetite, in his own
phrase, for feasting with panthers. Yet, in his terrible last years, first in
prison and then in exile and ill-health, he seemed to achieve a kind of
redemption through suffering, and his flourishes of wit and gallantry pierce
the heart.
The story has often been told and at first I feared
that Moisés Kaufman’s account of the three trials that wrecked Wilde’s life
were too familiar to achieve much impact. Gradually, however, the tension of
the courtroom cross-examinations, the overriding poignancy of the story and the
commanding strength of Michael Pennington’s performance turn this into a
dramatically charged and deeply moving experience.
Kaufman, who is both writer and director, at first
opts for unadorned docudrama, but there is a real dramatic skill here. The
transcripts from the trial – in which Wilde initially accused the Marquess of
Queensberry of criminal libel only to end up facing charges of gross indecency
himself – is accompanied by a host of other viewpoints. We hear extracts from
Wilde’s work, most notably that unhappiest of love letters ‘De Profundis’. The
dreadful Bosie recites from his self-serving memoirs, friends of Wilde’s such
as Frank Harris and Bernard Shaw offer their own perspective, while the clerks
of the court read from contemporary newspaper accounts.
Then, after the interval, when Wilde finds himself
in the dock, the rituals of courtroom drama are interrupted with less
naturalistic sequences. The blackmailing rent boys give their evidence in their
underwear, posing on bentwood chairs like hoofers in a Fosse musical; an
appalling pseudy present-day academic is wheeled on to opine that “Oscar’s project
(sic) was less about sodomy and more about art” (useful to have got that
learnt); and, at the end, the reality of the trial dissolves into an
expressionist nightmare as Wilde cracks under the strain.
There are occasional misjudgements, most notably an
embarrassing impersonation of Queen Victoria, but for the most part Kaufman
manages a powerful blend of information and drama.
Pennington, an actor who goes from strength to
strength, achieves a startling resemblance to Wilde and plays him with great
insight. In the early scenes, his patronising contempt for court proceedings
and his air of superiority are generally off-putting. You begin to understand
why he so outraged Victorian society. Yet Pennington also captures the flashes
of wisdom and wit in adversity, the hurt humanity and the depth of his love for
the odious Bosie. His downfall is harrowing to behold.
In comparison, everyone else on the stage seems
smaller, but Nick Waring memorably suggests Lord Alfred Douglas’s prettiness,
petulance and stupidity, James Aubrey is a notably boorish and brutal
Queensberry and there is fluent support from Clive Francis and William Hoyland
as the leading barristers.
It’s an absorbing, rewarding evening, though one
that caused this reviewer a pang: The Daily Telegraph, I regret to report, was
one of the newspapers that rejoiced in Wilde’s downfall.
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