The Importance of Being Oscar at Jermyn Street Theatre
Save for a lamp whose large cable snakes inelegantly across it, the spare stage design of director Michael Fentiman’s revival of Michael Mac Liammoir’s well-worn one-man show gives one nothing to look at save for Alistair Whatley. For the play’s two-hour duration, the actor will by turns embody the rascally erudition of the show’s primary subject, a host of other characters both fictional and real that enter into his orbit, and a mysterious but eminently enthused narrator who must, one supposes, be taken as the late Liammoir himself. In its beginning stages, the winding but chronologically straightforward monologue Whatley recounts is easily mistaken for a tell-don’t-show dictation of Oscar Wilde’s specialness, creakily assuming our inherent fascination with the subject without inviting us to discover and form it for ourselves. However, this proves deceptive. For all that Liammoir’s show risks stiffly declamatory inertia, it steers clear of it by virtue of sheer commitment to the pinballing, voracious wit of Wilde himself, nimbly channelled by the actor exhuming him.
With a softly jazzy drum accompaniment, we are guided into Wilde’s court-holding dominance of the London drinking scene through his delightedly bemused adventures in American academia, all of which the writer seems to perceive as empty reservoirs for him to flood with his trademark arch wit. No one and nothing is off limits from the writer’s detestation of the dull and banally absurd, and while Whatley is an engaged, erudite guide for the evening, he and the show come fully alive when he snaps into his subject’s own voice. His Wilde is perfectly snooty, betraying a hint of pride in his own erudition before bringing the house down with a perfectly timed zinger. All of the show’s biggest laughs belong to Wilde himself, delivering a kind of high society stand-up routine with poised elan. Still, there is also a fierce, wounded dignity later in the play, as Whatley recites Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol, condemning his three-year prison sentence and ostracisation on charges of gross indecency with calm, quiet fury. In moments such as this, the piercing clarity of his words are, in Whatley’s performance, allowed to co-exist with a barely concealed hurt.
Though its patter grows soothing with time, the monologue bringing us from one Wilde recital to another can feel akin to a Wikipedia-esque speedrun through factoids, inevitably drier than what the man himself has to say. Whatley is no less fluent in Liammoir’s speech than in Wilde’s, but more than anything, he makes us want the real deal back whenever he recedes from centre stage in his own story. Who better to take us into Wilde’s inflamed, devastating affairs, withering marriages and ambiguously (to a degree) debaucherous exploits than he himself? If this fluid, intellectually questing (much is made of the potential sources in Wilde’s own life for the creation of Dorian Gray) and finely performed re-staging has a weakness, it may be that Wilde’s stories and witticisms steal the show a little too much, but also risk blurring together over time. Thankfully, a midway act break does much to steer clear of monotony.
Ultimately, this re-staging of The Importance of Being Oscar satisfies both as an exercise in a lone actor’s total theatrical command of a small space (it is being staged in the 70 capacity Jermyn Street Theatre) and as a showcase for Wilde’s droll fireworks. Admirers of the writer will be well sated, and those with little prior familiarity may find themselves newly invigorated with the desire to know (and read) more.
Thomas Messner
Photos: Marc Brenner
The Importance of Being Oscar is at Jermyn Street Theatre from 28th March until 19th April 2025. For further information or to book visit the theatre’s website here.
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