Aubrey Malone
“You brute! You coward!” from an anonymous artist’s illustrations to Oscar Wilde’s An
Ideal
Husband. Original scan from Complete Writings of Oscar Wilde [Vol I]: The Duchess of Padua - The Ideal Husband, The Nottingham Society, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Photo: Public Domain.
Oscar Wilde’s play An Ideal Husband has been filmed a number of times. This week, however, I’d like to depart from my usual genre and recommend a theatrical production of it that I recently enjoyed at the Gate Theatre.
Films are fine, but there’s nothing to compensate for the experience of having real people within touching distance of you (I was in the front seat) and hearing them delivering lines that get different reactions each night.
Many of these are treasurable and have passed into folk memory:
“I love talking about nothing. It’s the only thing I know anything about.”
“I’m only serious between four and seven on Tuesdays.”
“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
“I always pass on good advice. It’s the only thing to do with it. It’s never of any use to oneself.”
“If only we could teach the English how to talk and the Irish how to listen.”
“I love political parties. They’re the only places where politics isn’t discussed these days.”
On the night I attended, the cast got a standing ovation. I felt it was deserved. Many of them chewed the scenery, but what else can you do with Oscar? He has to be overplayed to get the best out of him.
Having a top notch cast deliver a plethora of whip-smart lines for nearly two and a half hours (there’s an intermission after ninety minutes) makes for a challenging evening. In between the dollops of wit there’s a story. (“Ah yes,” as Ford Madox Ford once sighed, “We must have a story”).
Oscar’s one concerns a politician engaging in some egregious goings-on to retain his seat in the House of Commons. The verbal exchanges about them go on a tad too long. They should have been snipped in my view. They deprive the play of the impetus necessary to maximise reaction to its humour.
The set design by Kat Heath is gorgeous. Its opulence provides a much appreciated escape from the tawdry reality one leaves when going to an Edwardian play of this sort.
The transition between scenes is seamless. I normally don’t like looking at cast members shifting furniture around on stage (aren’t there people employed for this?) but here the activity is meshed into a dream sequence by the director, Marc Atkinson Borrull. It means he effectively kills two birds with one stone, making it into a special effect.
A minor caveat I had with the production was that a lot of the time the cast members spoke to the audience rather than to one another. It’s tempting to ‘milk’ a line by doing this but audiences respond better to comedy when they’re not being nudged in the ribs to laugh.
It’s like F. Scott Fitzgerald saying he hated exclamation marks in literature. “They’re like a writer laughing at his own joke,” he reflected. How right he was! (Oops).
An Ideal Husband is showing at the Gate until July 11.