Those Wilde Plays

I’ve been reading all my life and for the most part have been unimpressed with my English classes.  The reasons are too long to enumerate here, but one in particular that bothered me was when we got to the plays.  Shakespeare would be a prime example.

Now, that Shakespeare was an incredible playwright is beyond dispute, but unlike novels or regular poetry where the manuscript is the final stage, the script is only the beginning.  Plays are not completed until the actors, the props and everything is on stage and they’re performing their story in front of a live audience.

Much as Shakespeare’s writing has influenced me (I read Romeo and Juliet in the fourth grade, for crying out loud) it never feels alive until I’ve actually seen actors speak the words and perform the actions.  I found it annoying that we’d have to wait until we were almost done studying the plays that we’d actually get to watch the movies for Much Ado About Nothing and Macbeth in high school.  Never got to watch anything for Twelfth Night in college.

Personally, I think seeing it performed should have been the first thing we did.  And that especially goes with the real topic: Oscar Wilde.  The Importance of Being Earnest was funny, clever, quite a romping romance… but reading it in class was such a drag.  The entire time, our teacher was trying to convince us there was humor there.  We spent five minutes explaining why “bunburrying” was such a clever device.  Who cared?

It wasn’t until we actually saw the adaptation with Colin Firth and Judi Dench did anybody actually laugh.  Because of class schedules, it took us two days to get through, but man, those two days might have been the best we actually had in class.  I actually finished reading the play after that.

My favorite lines:

“I don’t like arguments.  They are always vulgar and often convincing.”

“It is a horrible thing to find out you’ve been telling the truth all your life.”

                        ***

The Importance of Being Earnest I think tends to be Wilde’s most popular play.  It sure is the funniest one.  But this past week, I found a BBC collection of filmed Oscar Wilde plays, and in it, I got to see two others that still have the wit, but much more heart.  Earnest, for all it’s great romping, romantic fun, is just about men who are liars and the stupid women more bothered about the men’s first names rather than their good nature.

An Ideal Husband, on the other hand, might be one of the best stories on marriage I’ve ever seen.  This is ironic because Wilde was a horrible husband himself, but that doesn’t stop him from hitting on the truth about spousal relationships.

The play begins with Sir Robert Chiltern, a widely respected politician, being blackmailed for a scam he pulled in his youth.  In despair, he turns to his friend Lord Goring for help, and Lord Goring’s first bit of advice is to tell his wife everything.  Sir Robert is too ashamed to do it and the guilt eats away at him until she finds out anyway, and that she has to hear about it from another party makes the matter even worse.

What’s especially pathetic about the story is that later, Lady Chiltern is caught in a bit of blackmail herself.  She also goes to Lord Goring for help and, once again, his first piece of advice is to tell her husband everything.  And she can’t bring herself to do that.

Very rarely do I want to yell at the TV screen.  There’s no point since they’re never going to listen to you, but it was so aggravating and yet so close to life; most every problem that strikes relationships is the inability or unwillingness to communicate with the other person.  The secrets canker and ruin everything they desire most.

Favorite lines:

“I always pass on advice.  It’s the only thing one can do with it.  It’s never the slightest use to oneself.”

“When the gods choose to punish us, they answer our prayers.”

                        ***

The second was Lady Windermere’s Fan, which at first seemed to also be another play on marriage that takes the opposite track; where in An Ideal Husband, Sir Robert is a respectable man with a sullied past, Lord Windermere in Fan is a very good man whose reputation is being tarnished for trying to help a stranger with her situation in life.  The society gossip is so bad that it’s turned his wife completely against him.

It seemed that this would be another great story on the importance of communication in marriage, but it becomes much more; Lady Windermere’s Fan is about parents, specifically motherhood and the folly it is to sacrifice it.  Mrs. Erlynne and Lady Windermere are the two significant mothers, the former having been a spectacularly horrible mom and the latter about to ruin her chance at raising her child.

This is one that will probably mean more to me when I have children in the future and can actually feel the full impact of Mrs. Erlynne’s counsel to Lady Windermere in the bachelor’s home.  It’s doesn’t even take up two minutes of the play but it gives meaning to all the rest of the story and ridiculousness of the other characters.

Favorite lines:

“The world has grown so suspicious of anything that looks like a happy married life.”

“I love talking to a brick wall.  It’s the only thing that never contradicts me.”