22 February 1892: Mr Oscar Wilde's new play Read more

It was interesting to hear last winter that Mr. Oscar Wilde, whose métier it has always been to jeer at English public taste, had suddenly hit this taste between wind and water and written a popular play, the greatest success of a middling season. Last night we saw it in Manchester for the first time, and with much curiosity on our own part to see how far Mr. Wilde had converted his public, and how far the public had obtained concessions from Mr Wilde. For Mr Wilde has assured us that he considers this country as a whole to be “extraordinarily Boeotian” (or stupid) in their judgment on works of art. As last night’s audience was in no way singular, we must assume that he would consider its members as incapable of giving a sound opinion as the rest of its countrymen. Well, this audience, so incapable, in Mr Wilde’s opinion, of judging aright, undoubtedly judged very favourably of Mr Wilde’s play. Is it that Mr Wilde has thrown art overboard and written frankly to fit the Boeotian taste and understanding? Or that he has performed the most masterly feat of all – that of presenting a real work of art so that even to Boeotians its quality is evident? Or is it that he overstated the general Boeotianism of us all? Even the last alternative is possible. But we lean rather to the belief that the other two have, between them, more to do with the success of the piece. For one thing, Mr Wilde has written far more like other people, far more like Dumas and even Mr Haddon Chambers, than could have been expected from one advertising himself the possessor of so remarkable a turn for singularity. And, into the bargain, he has, in some portions of the piece, thought out his situations and written his dialogue remarkably well.

The plot is this. A young wife, Lady Windermere, beautiful, virtuous, and attached to her husband, finds him spending great sums on a lady of equivocal reputation, a demi-mondaine, not in the blundering sense now given to the word, but in the true sense of a lady half countenanced and half barred in a monde where she struggles to be countenanced fully. Lord Windermere invites this lady, Mrs Erlynne, to a ball given on his wife’s birthday. His wife protests, and threatens to strike her across the face with her fan. That is the first act. In the second Mrs Erlynne comes to the ball, outshines the other women there – the other women and the whole of this ball scene are, in fact, as dull as they can well be, and Mrs. Erlynne has no trouble, – and aggravates the jealousy of the wife, who abandons the project of the fan, but rushes off instead to throw herself, for revenge’s sake, into the arms of Lord Darlington, an admirer of her own, for whom she does not care a pin. Behind her she leaves a letter to her husband, explaining her intention and her motives. In the third act Lady Windermere has arrived at Lord Darlington’s rooms, when Mrs Erlynne comes running to her rescue. She has found the letter, and has come to prevent Lady Windermere from committing an indiscretion which she has committed and regretted herself. She succeeds in her pleading, and they are about to leave, when Lord Windermere, Lord Darlington, and others come in, and the two women hide themselves, but Lady Windermere leaves her fan on a sofa. Lord Windermere finds it, pricks his ears, and is for searching the house, when Mrs Erlynne emerges and accepts all responsibilities by saying that she has brought the fan. Meanwhile Lady Windermere slips out. Really this is the end of the play, but there is a fourth act, in which reconciliations take place, and Mrs Erlynne, still a demi-mondaine, lively and unconverted, is married to a foolish lord and goes out smiling. Mr Jones or Mr Grundy would have made her a hospital nurse, if not a consumptive, and we are grateful to Mr Wilde for this scrap of artistic perception and truth. We understand that in the original form of the play the disclosure was first made in this fourth act that Mrs Erlynne was Lady Windermere’s mother. It is now confided by Lord Windermere to the audience at the end of the first act. The fourth act thus loses much of its raison d’être, but the play as a whole greatly gains. It is much more amusing to see Lady Windermere’s character struggling with difficulties which we can see through ourselves than to be distracted from the spectacle of her trials and Mrs Erlynne’s heroism by doubts of our own as to who Mrs Erlynne may be.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Oscar Wilde. Photograph: National Portrait Gallery London

It will be seen even from this little sketch that in the structure of the play there is a good deal of the most ordinary theatrical commonplace. The incident of the fan will be seen to-night on the same stage, almost word for word, one might say, in Mr Haddon Chambers’s “Idler.” Lady Windermere’s edifying principle of tit-for-tat in conjugal infidelity has been expounded in full by at least one heroine of Dumas. The idea of a divorced wife appearing to rescue a daughter, who does not know her, from danger of a similar fate has been used in the “Révoltée” of Lemaitre and, we believe, elsewhere. Mr Wilde has given the public a great deal of what it is known to like, but on the other hand he has, to his credit, made it like, or at least accept, one thing at all events that is good for it, though not much to its taste – the consistent and artistic treatment of Mrs Erlynne’s character to the very end. The dialogue is often good. At the end of the first act it is as salt and rapid as good comedy dialogue should be. Elsewhere it is several times forced and tedious beyond expression, and in the third act one long passage of highly worked-up witticisms, during the delivery of which the action makes almost a dead halt, is intolerably artificial in its own substance and still more in the crude and unprepared manner of its introduction. But on the whole the play is amusing, surprisingly like other plays of the same order adapted by English dramatists of moderate talents from the French, but at the same time always better than these performances wherever any real difference exists.

The acting is remarkably even, as we expect of this company; Miss Marion Terry a head and shoulders above the rest, but all equal to their work. Mr Alexander is manly and unstrained as Lord Windermere, the chivalrous man in a hard situation, and one uncommonly difficult to represent on the stage without excess of some kind in the use of the actor’s available means. Miss Marion Terry as the adventuress quite herself was not so telling as usual, but as the adventuress overcome by an access of tender feeling she is most admirable, and her delivery of the great speech of pleading to her daughter gave the audience the one moment of poignant emotion experienced in the evening. Miss Coleman as the metallic worldling with a daughter who answers all speeches with the “Yes, mamma” of a French ingénue, was clever and amusing, Miss Winifred Emery looked good and was good-looking as the endangered wife, and Miss Granville, Mr Nutcombe Gould, Mr H. H. Vincent, Mr Vane Tempest – indeed all the rest of the company – were so evenly competent that we do not care to draw hasty distinctions between them.

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