De Profundis by Oscar Wilde edited by Merlin Holland. Oxford Playhouse until 28 June 2001.

De Profundis is a dramatisation of Oscar Wilde's famous letter to his ill-fated love, Lord Alfred (Bosie) Douglas, written during the last months of his prison sentence in Reading gaol. His grandson, Merlin is credited as editor, but in tampering with this exquisitely worded act of contrition and arrogance, in the search for Wilde as a man, rather than as a writer, much has been lost.

The emphasis has been placed on the personal, at the expense of the philosophical. Hence, plenty of anecdotes about Bosie's monstrous egotism. Wilde compares Bosie to Aeschylus's lion cub, adopted and loved by a King. When the cub grows up he reveals the true nature of his race and destroys the King and his palace. More prosaically, Wilde re-counts his abandonment in Worthing at the hands of Douglas, and this slightly indulgent section does not serve Wilde or the piece well. Far better is Wilde's desire to understand himself: 'But while there were times when I rejoiced in the idea that my sufferings were to be endless, I could not bear them to be without meaning. Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is Humility. It is the last thing left in me, and the best.'

Corin Redgrave's performance is rather too patrician for this former flâneur, now a man broken by illness, shame and hard labour. He chooses to play Wilde with the Dublin vowels of his youth. Wilde, in fact, possessed a very polished, gilded English upper class accent, and though the inaccuracy grates rather, perhaps it is no bad thing that this device is used. We see him stripped bare of his conceit and affectations, as he would have been in gaol. Redgrave gives his performance a feverish edge, hinting at Wilde's fears that he was loosing his mind; but in the end it is left to our imaginative to imagine the sufferings that Wilde must have endured, although the starkness of the stage and the brief glimpse of barred sky gives us ample opportunity to contemplate Wilde's incarceration.

Ultimately, however, the performance and setting can only really detract from the power of Wilde's prose as he struggles to understand all that has gone before - 'I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand . . . Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.' Time spent contemplating the beauty of Wilde's prose and the atrocity committed against him by the British state is time spent well, but I left the Playhouse feeling De Profundis is far better served in its original form than warped to the demands of the stage.

Sarah Montgomery. 26-06-01