A Modern Perspective on Wilde as Man of Theatre

Abstract

Wilde’s wit and comic genius have always been acknowledged but often grudgingly or with an undercurrent of disparagement. The early critics hardly knew how to take him. ‘They laugh angrily at his epigrams’, said Shaw, reviewing the first performance of An Ideal Husband, ‘like a child who is coaxed into being amused in the very act of setting up a yell of rage and agony’. They did not grasp the subtlety of this wit. ‘As far as I can ascertain’ Shaw mocked, ‘I am the only person in London who cannot sit down and write an Oscar Wilde play at will.’¹ A few years later The Importance of Being Earnest seemed to Max Beerbohm to have already become a classic; yet although greatly admiring it and indeed taking to task the actors in a revival of 1902 for reducing it to ordinary farce, he still did not get its value right; it was the ‘horse-play’ of a distinguished mind. Disparaging attitudes have been modified over the years but have not disappeared. W. H. Auden praised The Importance of Being Earnest as the ‘only pure verbal opera in English’ but failed to grasp the theatrical force of the other plays, seeing only the split between the wit and the melodrama, not the provocative counter-pointing of one with the other.