The British Academy recently invited me to London to give a talk on why linguistics matters. They booked me a room at the Strand Palace Hotel, opposite the Savoy, where Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred (Bosie) Douglas loved to dine. Just yards down the street, Wilde’s An Ideal Husband was on at the Vaudeville Theatre, with the distinguished film actor Edward Fox (Day of the Jackal), age 81, playing the Earl of Caversham, and his son Freddie playing the Bosiesque junior leading man, Lord Goring.
Casually inquiring at the theater box office in the morning I ascertained that just two seats for that night were available. Stalls, second row, at a knock-down price (about $26 each). Fate was telling me and my companion that we were destined to see this production. I slapped down the cash to secure the tickets.
It was a good decision. The play is ingenious, filled with drama yet at times farcically funny. The whole production is excellent, but Freddie Fox is truly outstanding.
The trouble with delivering Wilde’s paradox-laden lines and over-the-top laugh-getters on the stage is that you are tempted to declaim them rather than just talk. The lines are so clever, and so famous, and the laughs so absolutely guaranteed, that an actor is tempted to turn toward the audience and lob the line into the air as a kind of applause grenade, and stand there waiting for the inevitable approbation. Plenty of the minor cast members in the early cocktail-party scene did just that, and seemed unnatural and histrionic.
Freddie Fox, by contrast, has somehow mastered the knack of behaving exactly like a real person — albeit a rich, confident, annoying, flirtatious young aristocrat, far too clever for his own good — and delivering those paradox lines deftly, never overplaying them.
He can snap out those lines (“I love talking about nothing, father; it is the only thing I know anything about”) while strolling across the stage or draping himself across a chaise longue, and make it look as if they had literally just occurred to him on the spur of the moment. I’ve seen Wildean comedy done badly and seen it done well, and I’ve never seen anyone do it better than Freddie Fox.
Strolling out onto the Strand after the performance, opposite the Savoy, I mused on the story of Wilde’s tragic fall after he wrote that play. He was at the peak of his career when it opened on January 3, 1895, at the Haymarket, and it was an instant hit. On April 6, it moved to the Criterion. But that same day Wilde was arrested for “gross indecency” with a young man named Alfred Taylor. Theaters started removing Wilde’s name from billboards and marquees wherever his plays were showing (The Importance of Being Earnest had opened on Valentine’s Day, and was soon anonymous).
His trial began, just a mile or two east of the Savoy and the Vaudeville, less than three weeks after his arrest. The jury could not agree, but another trial was started almost immediately. On May 25, Wilde was convicted, sentenced to two years’ hard labor, and taken to prison. Just 142 days had elapsed since the triumphant opening of An Ideal Husband.
He served his two years (the maximum permitted under law), and it just about broke him. When released on May 18, 1897, he went straight into exile in France under a new name, Sebastian Melmoth. An ear infection stemming from a perforated eardrum, the consequence of a bad fall while he was in prison, got worse and apparently turned into bacterial meningitis. By November 30, 1900, he was dead.
A new film about those last three years, The Happy Prince, just opened at a small independent cinema near where I live. (It is scheduled to be released in the U.S. on October 5.) Naturally I went to see it. Rupert Everett, the director, is compelling as Wilde. Colin Morgan gives an amazing performance, playing Bosie like a blond mercurial demon, alternating affection with raw hostility and psychological cruelty.
And this August (it seems to be an Oscar Wilde year) I will have a chance to see Simon Callow performing the whole of De Profundis, the bitter 50,000-word letter to Bosie that Wilde wrote in prison but was not allowed to send.
So many ironies. Wilde’s offense was only made into a crime by the “Labouchere Amendment” to the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, just 10 years before Wilde’s arrest. And his conviction, along with all historical convictions for that offense, was expunged by an automatic retrospective pardon under the Policing and Crime Act of 2017 (the “Alan Turing Law”). Wilde is no longer guilty of any criminal offense. Unfortunately this good news came 120 years too late.