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