OSCAR WILDE PLAYS FULL

So, they hit upon an ingenious plan: Why not invite a real Aesthete over to America to give a lecture on art or dress so that the audience could see for themselves who was being ridiculed? It wasn’t long before Wilde received a telegram from D’Oyly Carte’s office in New York: “Responsible agent asks me to inquire if you will consider offer he makes for fifty readings beginning November first.” Wilde replied: “Yes, if offer is good.”Īnd so it was that on January 2, 1882, Oscar Wilde arrived in New York on the S.S. However, the Aesthetic Movement was unknown stateside, so the producers were worried that the audience would not be in on the joke.

The operetta proved highly successful, and it wasn’t long before it was invited to America. Wilde attended the first night and is said to have remarked: “Caricature is the homage that mediocrity pays to genius.” When Gilbert and Sullivan sought to satirise the Aesthetic Movement in the operetta Patience, they used Wilde as one of the models for the poet Bunthorne. Barnum’s maxim that “there is no such thing as bad publicity.” Frequently satirised in the press and in magazines as a sort of limp aesthete, he was often depicted surrounded by sunflowers or lilies, or in the case of this cartoon in Punch, as one himself.įar from doing him any harm, this type of attention simply proved Phineas T. One hundred thirty years before the Kardashians, Wilde was quick to realize that you did not have to do anything to become famous it was simply enough to be and to get noticed. She remarked of Wilde: “What has he done, this young man that one meets him everywhere? Oh yes he talks well, but what has he done? He has written nothing, he does not sing or paint or act - he does nothing but talk.

The great Polish actress Helena Modjeska arrived in London in 1880 to perform a season at the Court Theatre. He befriended painters, like the expatriate American James McNeill Whistler society beauties, like Lillie Langtry famous actresses, like Sarah Bernhardt and made sure he was seen at all the right parties and opening s nights. So what was he doing in America ten years before, and how did he come to make his theatrical debut there? To answer that, we need to take a step back in time.Īfter coming down from Oxford University in 1878, Wilde settled in London and became associated with the Aesthetic Movement - the philosophy of “Art for Art’s Sake” espoused by John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and William Morris, amongst others. We tend to think of Wilde as always having been a literary genius, but he didn’t, in fact, become a successful playwright until he was in his late thirties.

OSCAR WILDE PLAYS FULL

This was a full nine years before the run of society comedies that secured Wilde’s reputation as a playwright, beginning with Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1892 and culminating with The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895. The New York Herald review called it “long-drawn dramatic rot.” The twenty-eight-year-old author was at the opening night, but despite a great deal of hullabaloo, the production closed after just one week. The play was called Vera or, The Nihilists and was produced at the Union Square Theatre on August 20, 1883. It may surprise you to know that the first production of an Oscar Wilde play did not take place in London or Dublin or Paris, but in New York. While Wilde was always happy to use America as the butt of his elegant jokes, he actually had a deep affection for the country, because it was in America that he made his name and began to write for the theatre. It is one of many references to America and Americans in Wilde’s only novel, and there are countless more in his short stories, essays, and plays. That pithy exchange is from the new adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray I had the pleasure of adapting with Oscar Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland. Lady Agatha: Really ? And where do bad Americans go when they die? Dorian: They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris.

Oscar wilde plays