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