A Wilde flight of theatrical fancy
Last updated 05:38, Friday, 05 September 2008
In Extremis, Theatre by the Lake, Keswick
One has to question whether a play which starts just before 11pm, playing to a handful of people sitting like peas in a giant pod in the Main House, is an experiment that works. Peter Rylands and his co-performer, Pamela Buchner, battle on manfully, but Neil Bartlett’s In Extremis is a play much more suited to a Studio performance, and at a more earthly hour.
It’s the eve of Oscar Wilde’s court hearing and, in turmoil, he visits Mrs Robinson, a society palmist and complete stranger, for advice. Should he risk attending the hearing or leave the country?
Rylands shows Wilde as a man of arrogant vanity. And in the end it is that vanity that causes him to miss the subtle warning Mrs Robinson gives him. In his hand, that of a sensitive but selfish man, she sees a triumph. Of course it could be the sort of Triomphe with an Arc that Wilde would see if he fled to Paris, but the playwrite is too self important to understand the hint and walks away to face his accusers with disastrous results.
For Bartlett, In Extremis is an opportunity for a flight of fancy. His imagination runs free as his character, Mrs Robinson, describes what took place in her London flat on a March evening 100 years earlier. Pamela Buchner displays the snobbery and false gentility of a woman who can’t stop name dropping about her society acquaintances.
In the event Wilde lost his case, was accused of homosexuality, arrested, charged, tried and convicted of public indecency and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. Perhaps the great writer, at the height of his career, should have listened more carefully.
Or was he so used to flattery he could not interpret Mrs Robinson’s warning the way he should have done?
ROSS BREWSTER
