I was keen to attend this performance due to an ongoing interest in Oscar Wilde – how did a life so full of exuberance, intelligence and eccentricity (such that, as a student in Oxford there is an apocryphal anecdote that Oscar Wilde kept a pet lobster which he used to walk up and down the High) come to such a pretty pass as two year’s hard labour in Reading Gaol? Also, in a professional capacity, I visited Reading Gaol in the period shortly before it closed in 2013. Even then it was a horrid place full of accumulated unhappiness and ill-humours, completely unfit for purpose in the 21st century and a grim place in which to spend your sentence, but I find it difficult to imagine what Victorian hard labour was like. Let alone if you were incarcerated for what we would now consider prejudicial and discriminatory reasons. Just for loving someone.

So keen was I to attend Wilde without the Boy I battled Storm Goretti and joined a packed audience physically soaked to the skin, gently steaming in the confines of the Burton Taylor, only by the end of the performance to find myself soaked to the soul and deeply moved. I think one of the great benefits of the Burton Taylor is the intimacy with the audience and its limited ability to house complex staging often leads to more imaginative and creative pieces and performances. Last night’s staging was minimalist – a table, a lamp and two chairs (and the second chair was somewhat superfluous) – and sat on the front row, I was at times eye ball to eye ball with Gerard Logan playing Oscar, which must have been somewhat disconcerting for him when focussed on such an introspective performance, as I spent the majority of the second half of the performance reduced to tears.

However, he is clearly the consummate professional and a brief Google of reviews of previous stagings shows how well his performance and the play has been received. Gerard has a profound understanding of Wilde’s language and such familiarity belies the ease with which he projects his inner Oscar from whispered intimacies to great howls of overwhelming emotion. Ultimately, what I enjoyed about last night’s performance (and in spite of the tears, I did greatly enjoy myself) is that I felt a deep connection with an Oscar Wilde, the ultimate wordsmith, struggling with his word hoard and wit in an attempt to reconcile his situation and his feelings for Bosie. In my own small way I too have similarly struggled to express myself in writing, and for me in the end the best art is not that which you intellectually engage with, although that may come later, but that art which connects most directly with your emotional landscape.

Indeed there are many layers of complexity of language in this play – how could there not be in a play about Oscar Wilde – but both the writer, Gareth Armstrong, and the actor, Gerard Logan, are evidently masters of the material (namely, De Profundis, the moving letter penned to Bosie towards the end of Wilde's sentence). This mastery liberates the performance to focus on the emotions of the pivotal point at which Oscar finds himself: about to leave Reading Gaol for a different life, stripped of glamour and draped in Victorian shame. I found that the passing, agonising reference to Oscar being considered unfit to spend time with his children resonated with some of my own past experiences working on child sexual exploitation, but I suppose this just emphasizes the differences in modern and Victorian attitudes and hindsight is a great leveller.

After the somewhat tortuous and convoluted revelations of the first half of Wilde without the Boy it was superlative to wrap up the second half of the night with a rendition of the “Ballad of Reading Gaol”. The cross-references between the two halves of the performance served to underline the impact of hearing the words of Oscar’s own jail experience, delivered with such consummate ease. For me ultimately this underlined a fundamental truth which I hope Oscar Wilde would have liked – it truly was a crime to be Oscar!

It also goes some way to explain our continuing fascination with Wilde – not only driven by repeated performances of his plays (my first experience being the ubiquitous The Importance of Being Earnest) but also by the many books, films and documentaries about his life, work and the relationship between Bosie (forever for me Jude Law in the 1997 movie Wilde) and Wilde (who for me is always Rupert Everett in the Happy Prince). Even a quick glimpse at Wilde’s profile on IMDB demonstrates all the many fascinating facets of his biography and bibliography which we have and continue to explore. However, if you want a meaningful and moving insight into his work, in my opinion you cannot do better than Wilde without the Boy. There are still a few tickets left for tonight’s performance….