Review by Simon Jenner, April 4th 2025
Imitation can be more original than flattery. Actor-playwright Micheál Mac Liammóir (1899-1978) bestrides the one-man Wilde play like the originating colossus he was. His 1960 The Importance of Being Oscar even exists as a 1964 film. Original Theatre and Reading Rep revive their production from last year (fittingly, near Reading Gaol), where Alastair Whatley manages the feat of emerging triumphant from two shades. He brings it to Jermyn Street Theatre directed by Michael Fentiman till April 18th.
Alastair Whatley. Photo: Marc Brenner
So dominant was Mac Liammóir and his play for more than 15 years, that – only after his death – he (and Wilde) achieved the rare feat of inspiring a tradition. Mervyn Holland’s The Trials of Oscar Wide and at Jermyn Street itself, Gerard Logan’s Wilde Without the Boy, seen here in 2021. This latter is similar to Mac Liammóir in structure and shares material: but uses more original matter in the second post-jail half, and dispenses with most of pre-1895.
Indeed Fentiman’s version discards a fair amount of Mac Liammóir’s work too. Originally 140 minutes plus interval, even it adopted and dropped as it went on. This revival cuts the account of Dorian Gray in particular, and snips judiciously. At around 95 minutes plus interval it navigates the mostly Wilde material almost without you noticing the cuts. And seems lighter on its feet. You can tell, since some of that recording opens and closes the show.
Mac Liammóir asserts Wilde “invented the 1890s, that remarkable decade through the first half of which he strutted, and through the latter half he staggered.” With a little help.
After a newly-written prologue, with nods to Jermyn Street itself, Whatley still starts with the early life, where the only conventional thing Wide did was leave Ireland as soon as possible. The 1880s self-declared aesthete, never mind genius (inspired by the personally more timid Walter Pater), Wilde was at first all cut lilies and carnations. His indeed aesthetic poetry was tended for Lily Langtry, and of a very different stamp to that last blazing Ballad. We’re soon in America with miners, the best-dressed men he’d met there. “I had to tell them that Benvenuto Cellini had been dead for quite some time. At which they immediately asked: ‘Who shot him?’”
Alastair Whatley. Photo: Marc Brenner
Whatley’s performance doesn’t adopt the Irish lilt Mac Liammóir re-integrated into Wilde’s persona, long excised by the British: who having broken Wilde colonised him with an accent. But to imitate Mac Liammóir , as Simon Callow, his dresser and finally successor proclaims, was something he said (in his Introduction) he “must absolutely not attempt.” Nor does Whatley.
There’s a unique quintessence in staging too. Madeleine Girling’s set of two Os concentrate predominantly on a patch stage-right. A circular teal-coloured dais and with Chris Davey’s lighting (including the traditional lamp, latterly replaced by a prison stool) an illuminated oval like a mirror invokes a portal of quiet magic. Whatley, clad in Girling’s unexpected rust-brown velvet suit, steps through it or retreats behind. Though there’s nowhere but the tenebrous dark and occasionally wan moonlight playing on his face when Whatley recites, much later, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’. Barnaby Race’s use of Chopin’s wintry Ballade No in in G minor evokes moments of Dorian Gray.
The title might more recently suggest early identity politics, but more importantly it reveals Wilde’s truth. Moving from “Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about,” to his assault on “shallowness” – Whatley leaping over the Dorian Gray cut – we’re conducted rapidly through the unfamiliar poems, and better-known tales and stage triumphs (pausing on the ”handbag” moment in The Importance with Lady Bracknell).
This Wilde is inevitably a stark before-and-after. Indeed that turning point is reached on The Importance’s opening night February 14th 1895. Assailed by two almost identical men, the father-son Scylla and Charybdis of Queensberry and Bosie, Wilde defies all advice and sues the former for libel: the trials and sentencing are proverbial; they’re dealt with but more through what Wilde wrote, with “the love that dare not speak its name.”
Alastair Whatley. Photo: Marc Brenner
Alastair Whatley. Photo: Marc Brenner
In De Profundis, the long letter Wilde wrote Bosie from prison in early 1897, Wilde is now the scourge above all, of “shallowness”. But was this volte-face really the product of prison? Neither Mac Liammóir in that filmed version, nor the very different Whatley think so for a moment. Whatley adopts a tone of someone drawing his breath in pain as he essays this: an eloquence gravid with tragedy, and a different tone to the Ballad, where he withdraws into a wraith of himself, a disembodied spirit.
That scourge, primarily of himself, is what Whatley opens Act Two with, in embarking on that long unread letter. Wilde, above all, is his own Sphinx, more than his beloved Ada Leverson (later celebrated for The Little Ottleys trilogy and exquisitely invoked here by Whatley). Profoundly moral, the author of The Soul of Man Under Socialism, the last thing Wilde truly thought was that “all art is utterly useless”. He desperately sought to hide being Ernest, in every queer or literal sense. Best do it in plain sight.
Alastair Whatley. Photo: Marc Brenner
Alastair Whatley. Photo: Marc Brenner
Whatley reveals more vocally agile notes, perhaps, than the originator, and doesn’t portentously accent the judge as Mac Liammóir did. But he lightly inflects a gallimaufry of characters and indeed renders Wilde more mercurial, quizzical and fun. Whatley has to radiate his own as well as Wilde’s presence, and this lightning-sketch of joy and stillness – informing Wilde’s incarceration – flicker with images: of Wilde, on November 13th 1895 being transported to Reading being spat upon; just as the gentry and prostitutes had danced on hearing of his sentencing. There’s fine moments to of a French life, the moment with Bosie passed over (it was the core of David Hare’s 1999 The Judas Kiss). And after one late, surprise tale, that terminal moment with magenta wallpaper.
This is a first-rate revival, Fentiman particularly adept at invoking nuance and half-lit smile, a world of covert celebration. Indeed he pre-empted the National’s joyously gay production of The Importance of Being Earnest with one (dare one say more earnest, engaged) during the Vaudeville Theatre’s festival of the four comedies. Whatley takes the joy of the sorrow, and makes it his own. Unmissable if you can squeeze in.
Producer Tom Hackney for Original Theatre, and Rading Rep Theatre, Production Manager Brian Watson, Stage Manager Emma Currie, Wardrobe Master David Morgan, Production Co-Ordinator Lisa Friedrich, Head of Marketing Emma Martin, PR Alison Duguid PR, Photography Michael Wharley, Graphic designer Steph Pyne, Photographer Marc Brenner, Social Media Manager Paul Jennings for Hero Social
Alastair Whatley. Photo: Marc Brenner
