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Running Wilde

On opening night of the world premiere of Christopher Wheeldon’s “Oscar” at the Australian Ballet’s new home for the next three years, the Regent Theatre (as the State Theatre undergoes renovations), I am catapulted from September 13, 2024 to April 26, 1885, and the commencement of the trial of Oscar Wilde. “Now as the jury files back into court,” narrates Seán O’Shea, “Oscar leaned over the dock, eagerly scanning the faces of the twelve good men and true, seemingly trying to read in their physiognomies his fate; no-one spoke, no-one hardly dared to breathe.” In the thick of it, we begin, and the effect is a kaleidoscopic tornedo. In the moment before the rise becomes the fall, “Oscar” teeters, and the effect is hypnotic, from start to finish.

Performance

The Australian Ballet: “Oscar” by Christopher Wheeldon

Place

The Regent Theatre, Melbourne, Australia, September 13 & 14, 2024

Words

Gracia Haby

Benjamin Garrett and Callum Linnane in “Oscar” by Christopher Wheeldon. Photograph by Christopher Rodgers-Wilson

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On May 25, Wilde was imprisoned and sentenced to two years hard labour, the maximum sentence allowed, for crimes of “gross indecency” following his relationship with Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas.[1] But this new work, commissioned by the Australian Ballet, and introduced by artistic director David Hallberg as “a story not typically seen in classical ballet” is no bio-ballet.[2] Rather than a linear tale of Wilde’s life, it is one that rumbles and sparkles at a pace befitting Wilde’s wit and legacy, in a beautiful melding of both life and writing. 

As such, colliding on the stage, Wheeldon weaves Wilde’s fairy tale, The Nightingale and the Rose, in Act I, and The Picture of Dorian Gray in Act II, to tease out delicious Wildean questions and paradoxes, and further blur the line between where the artist ends and the art begins. We skitter between history and memory, fiction and fairy tale, the interior self and the external façade, in epigrammatic fashion. We meet Wilde as both the celebrated playwright and author, cigarette in hand, held aloft on the shoulders of two men, the literal toast of society, and, conversely, as C.3.3,[3] the prison-given identity which indicated the third cell on the third landing of C block, and under which Wilde would be known. From one of fame to one of torment, “Oscar” begins at the moment Wilde’s world is severed. Wilde, inhabited so completely by Callum Linnane, balances upon the knife edge of what was and what will become, ever netting the complex emotions of the human heart, just as Wilde’s own fairy tales do. Alluding a fixed meaning and instead proposing an open ‘perhaps’, just like The Nightingale, in the spirit of Wilde’s own observation, in The Truth of Masks that a “truth in art is that whose contradictory may also be true.”[4]

Callum Linnane as Oscar Wilde in “Oscar” by Christopher Wheeldon. Photograph by Christopher Rodgers-Wilson

Wheeldon gives Wilde and Joseph Caley’s Robbie Ross, albeit briefly, and later, more sustainedly, Wilde and Benjamin Garrett’s “Bosie,” their “After the Rain” moment. To finally see two figures, entwined, andthere being noneedto translatea heteronormative tenderness to my own experience, my own world, my own way of being, is so beautiful. And in Linnane and Garrett’s pas de deux it feels like a new beginning, or, to paraphrase Hallberg in his conversation with Wheeldon in the Dress Circle the following day, now we can change the course without apology or fear.[5] As Garrett catches, supports, and then gently twists and ushers Linnane upside down, both feet extended in the air, so the two almost mirror each other, meeting in the middle, like for like, it is a new beginning, a long time coming. Slowly pinwheeling across the stage, Linnane then rotates Garrett, and the effect is breathtaking. All the more for the known outcome, for this fairytale, like the carnations in the lapels watered with arsenic so as to turn them green, cannot last. 

Elsewhere, under the spell, Ako Kondo as the Nightingale is repeatedly suspended, quivering, wings breaking, and pierced by the Rose Tree of five male figures. Some with green carnations in their buttonholes, with a back vent of blood-red in their suiting, and one with a gloved red hand, it is the fairytale that allows the reader room for interpretation. By moonlight, different narratives not immediately detectable are revealed, and the outcome is tragic. The Nightingale proposes, as Wilde wrote, “many answers” beneath the ‘all for love; all for naught’ first appearance.[6] As Kondo’s Nightingale rolls across the folded-forward backs of the five figures as the Rose Tree, the anguish is palpable.

Mia Heathcote, Benedicte Bemet, and Jill Ogai in “Oscar” by Christopher Wheeldon. Photograph by Christopher Rodgers-Wilson

Highlighted by the shapes they form, whether together or apart from Wilde, from Sharni Spencer, as Constance Wilde, in the end of evening pas de trois of stolen glances and longing between Linnane and Caley, to Benedicte Bemet as Sara Bernhardt, Wilde’s Incomparable One; Mia Heathcote’s “with the air of bird” Lillie Langtry; Jill Ogai’s mesmerising Ellen Terry; and Adam Elmes as Oscar’s Shadow sans mask, “Oscar” swings, rapidly so, between different characters, times, meanings, and locations. Bookended between the high art, highbrow of Wigmore Hall, a well-regarded recital hall in London, and a popular venue, Wilton’s Music Hall in the East End of London, as set and costume designer Jean-Marc Puissant explains locations are further unpinned and fluid, by Act II, in a telling of the whole.[7] The contrast of states particularly apparent in the narrow footprint of the cell in which Wilde dwelled (and described in The Ballard of Reading Gaol) as a “foul and dark latrine,” where “Sleep will not lie down, but walks / Wild-eyed and cries to Time.” Joby Talbot’s gloriously unsettled score, undercuts, and Orchestra Victoria, under conductor Jonathan Lo, fling open a doorway to a whole new world, replete with an insistent ringing to evoke Wilde’s tinnitus as a result of a fall whilst he was imprisoned. 

Returning again, the following night, to see the world repositioned, did not disappoint, as once more Linnane rendered himself near unrecognisable and misshapen as the final “withered, wrinkled, and lonesome of visage” in full Gothic awareness of past selves.[8] Expressing the inward, outwardly, I am floored by what is no longer hidden. Removing the filter, removing the mask, in more ways than one.

Gracia Haby

Using an armoury of play and poetry as a lure, Gracia Haby is an artist besotted with paper. Her limited edition artists’ books, and other works hard to pin down, are often made collaboratively with fellow artist, Louise Jennison. Their work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and state libraries throughout Australia to the Tate (UK). Gracia Haby is known to collage with words as well as paper.

footnotes

  1. It wasn’t until 2017 that Oscar Wilde, and an estimated 50,000 men, were pardoned by the British government for the “crime” of gross indecency. “UK issues posthumous pardons for thousands of gay men,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/31/uk-issues-posthumous-pardons-thousands-gay-men-alan-turing-law, accessed September 15, 2024
  2. “As we present the world premiere of ‘Oscar,’ we are making history… Representation for all people is paramount to our vision of the future.” David Hallberg introduction, “Oscar,” The Australian Ballet programme, Melbourne and Sydney, 2024, p. 11.
  3. Once incarcerated, the prisoner lost his name and henceforth would be known only by the cell number. Wilde’s The Ballard of Reading Gaol is published under the name C.3.3.
  4. Review by Graham Price of Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales by Anne Markey, Irish University Review, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Autumn/Winter), 2013, p. 445,  https://www.jstor.org/stable/24576861, accessed September 15, 2024.
  5. David Hallberg in conversation with Christopher Wheeldon, as part of “Hallberg In Conversation,” Dress Circle, Regent Theatre, Saturday September 14, 2024
  6. “I like to fancy that there may be many meanings in the tale [The Nightingale and the Rose] for in writing it I did not start with an idea and clothe it in form, but began with a form strove to make it beautiful enough to have many secrets and many answers.” Oscar Wilde, “Letters,” p. 218, cited by John-Charles Duffy in “Gay-Related Themes in the Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde,” Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2001, p. 329, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25058557, accessed September 25, 2024.
  7. “Designing ‘Oscar’ with Jean-Marc Puissant,” The Australian Ballet YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHMvs2Suofc, accessed September 13, 2024.
  8. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, from the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 172, cited by Alison Milbank, “Positive Duality in The Portrait of Dorian Gray The Wildean, No. 44, January 2014, p. 34, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48569039, accessed September 14, 2024.

comments

Ellen Sowchek

The actual year of Wilde’s trial was 1895 rather than 1885, as written in the review.

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