Pathos amid the bons mots
Sees the latest production in the West End Oscar Wilde season, and the first to truly do him justice
‘For both of us, a new life is beginning.” Is there a more inadvertently poignant final curtain line in all British drama? Oscar Wilde ended An Ideal Husband as he had to: on a note of marital reconciliation and fourth-act uplift, the threat of disaster for his protagonists banished.
When the play opened in 1895, it would have been met with gratified applause. Watching it now, in a revival by Jonathan Church that’s quite the best thing so far in the year-long Wilde festival at the Vaudeville, it’s impossible not to view the climax through the prism of misty-eyed hindsight.
Within six months of its opening, following his abortive libel trial, Wilde was facing a dismal “new life”, financially crippled, convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years in prison. He was dead in five years. An Ideal Husband is stalked more than any other of his plays by the shadow of public disgrace, the failure to live up to pious, impossible expectation.
Years ago, Sir Robert Chiltern, now Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, made his fortune by taking a backhander for passing on classified government information. At the beginning of the play’s 24-hour cycle of action, his nemesis arrives at his grand house on Grosvenor Square in the shape of Mrs Cheveley, who has evidence of his past wrongdoing, and will release it unless he reverses the government’s hostile position on a fraudulent South American canal scheme in which she has riskily invested far too much.
As played by Frances Barber with a purring, feline satisfaction – sharpened claws lurking beneath elaborate regalia – this is high-end blackmail, every threat accompanied by a bon mot. Wilde and his cohort came across rougher sorts as they contended with the threat of exposure for their illicit homosexual liaisons. The lever of psychological pressure in either case is the same: not just exposed for having committed a crime but for having founded your whole life on a lie.
Sir Robert’s salvation stems superficially from creaky plot contrivances but, more deeply, from a confrontation with the expectations of his nearest and dearest – a domestic microcosm of wider societal pressures to conform. Nathaniel Parker’s agonised Sir Robert pleads with Sally Bretton as his high-minded wife not to put men on a pedestal. “Why can’t you women love us, faults and all?” He’s too plain guilty for that line not to get a wry laugh – and it’s his friend Lord Goring who comes to put the case for forgiveness most persuasively: “Nobody is incapable of doing a foolish thing. Nobody is incapable of doing a wrong thing.”
The brilliance of Freddie Fox’s performance as Goring is that he can turn on a sixpence from being incredibly funny – often by the most minimal, impassive means – to winningly serious. He made his mark early as Wilde’s fall-precipitating lover Lord Alfred Douglas in David Hare’s The Judas Kiss at Hampstead. Here at 29, he gives us the eerie sense of Bosie himself – or an idealised version, at once dandy and redeemer – having stepped into the role of the sexually ambiguous, Adonis-like anti-hero. Fox is dangerous, decent, anarchic, adorable. Never declaiming, he makes century-old aphorisms fresh-minted.
He has arrived in the nick of time in terms of the season. Still to come is The Importance of Being Earnest but A Woman of No Importance looked strangely inconsequential and Lady Windermere’s Fan became diverting froth. Often the counterproductive effect has been to make Wilde seem dated, beside the point, stultifyingly drawing-room. That Goring’s father is here played by Fox’s real-life pater, Sir Edward, 81, is a neat theatrical trick, adding comedy and pathos. Yet it highlights the strengths and weaknesses so far. Fox senior is stiff, stern, reproving, actorly, ancien regime. Fox fils is leisurely, drawling, urbane, hypnotic, the Wildean spirit of modernity. We need more of fabulous Fred and his ilk, please.