Wilde
alexandra.coghlan
Directing an Oscar Wilde play is rather like being a chaperone at a party: at best you are invisible, at worst actively intrusive. Marshalling Wilde’s politicos, dandies and duchesses through this latest ball of An Ideal Husband, Lindsay Posner is quick to lose himself among the elegant riot of gilded sets and gorgeous dresses. Faithful to the letter (pink-papered, naturally), the production plays it straight, relying on the skills of a splendid cast to save it from straying into the limp pastiche of amateur dramatics.Weightier than either Lady Windermere’s Fan or A Woman of No Importance, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Simon Callow is on the phone when I arrive at his five-star digs, booming his apparently considerable misgivings vis-a-vis appearing in some reality TV exercise in which he will be asked to tutor disadvantaged kids in the mysterious arts of Shakespeare. “They keep saying it will be great”, he rumbles, “but it will only be great if it’s great.” And Amen to that.All voice, gesture and bustle, Callow (b 1949) couldn’t really be anything other than a certain kind of actor. Indeed, if you could bottle the quite extraordinary way in which he wraps lips, tongue and molars around the phrase “post hoc Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The last time I saw Oscar Wilde’s biblical tale it was performed by dancer Lindsay Kemp at the Roundhouse in London, back in the 1970s, in a production that was high on dope, incense, strange vocal drawling - and which transported you very quickly to hippie heaven. Choked by clouds of fragrant perfume, weird in its singsong language and thrilling in its strangeness, this seemed like an ideal way of realising the crazy vision of this odd piece. But theatre is not about being faithful to fond memories, it’s about the constant restaging of classic plays, so this new version of Wilde’s 1892 play Read more ...
Veronica Lee
I had a slightly surreal experience last night, when an actor playing the butler of a future Cabinet minister in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband announced during the interval that David Cameron had just departed Buckingham Place en route to 10 Downing Street to form the next UK government. It was just one of a few pleasing convergences of art and life of the evening, not least of which was that we were gathered in something called the Churchill Room at the time.The play, which has several political references that could have been written just before curtain-up, was performed by a group of Read more ...
theartsdesk
Our February DVD releases are light on stars, heavy on variety. We range from the Amazon rain forest to female wrestling and killer futons (we're not joking) in Japan and clandestine video reportage in Burma; from Pushkin’s Russia to Darwin’s England and the French criminal underworld. The Americans are under siege in love and war. Our DVD of the Month finds Britain's Sam Mendes taking a quizzical look at the all-American dream. Peter Watkins's Privilege, exhumed from the Age of Aquarius, is the selected re-release. And our reluctant choice of turkey is the thriller that caught Bertrand Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Oscar Wilde was once bossing a high-society drawing-room with swishes of his rapier wit when someone else had the temerity to mint an aphorism. “I wish I’d said that,” intoned the great man. Back came the devastating retort: “You will, Oscar, you will.”Wilde was in fact a keen recycler of his own bon mots. Many of those clever-clever inversions that ornament the plays first did service in The Picture of Dorian Gray. The author’s pragmatic calculation was that if they worked on the page, why not the stage? But for some reason, not a lot of them seem to have made the onward journey to the Read more ...