Category: Review

Article · Review

Oscar Wilde’s Birthday Dinner

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A Review of the Oscar Wilde Birthday Dinner, 2017

This Article First Appeared in Intentions,
(New Series No. 105, Feb. 2018)
Published by the Oscar Wilde Society

http://oscarwildesociety.co.uk

The twenty-sixth Oscar Wilde Society annual birthday dinner was held on October 13, 2017 at the National Liberal Club in Whitehall — a now familiar home for the Society and its regulars. However, for one delinquent expatriate member it was a first visit to this ‘new’ venue, a fact which prompted the surprised realisation that my previous birthday dinner was almost twenty years ago.

On that distant occasion the dinner was held at the Cadogan Hotel, an experience now so far removed from The National Liberal Club that it might have happened to an invented younger brother. This Wildean idea seemed apt because, if we condense the intervening two decades into the perspective of successive events, the two places emerge as opposite sides of the same coin of the Oscar realm.

Let me explain.

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Announcement · Article · Review

The Oscar Wilde Bar

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Aesthetic period door plaque. Oscar Wilde Bar, New York City.

There have been Oscar Wilde bars before now: in Berlin, San Diego, Chicago, and, I seem to recall, one previously in New York City. There is a Wilde Café in Minneapolis, and a bar called Oscar Wilde 9 located, both surprisingly and unsurprisingly, at #9 Oscar Wilde St. in Mexico City.

Most of these pretenders, however, merely give a nod to the old boy by borrowing his name. One or two, such as Wilde’s Restaurant in The Lodge at Ashford Castle, in Cong, Ireland, and the Oscar Wilde room at the Café Royal in Piccadilly, London, try a little harder to embody Oscar’s maxim that moderation is a fatal thing, and nothing succeeds like excess.

Raising The Bar

But believe me, none of them, past or present, comes remotely close to the lavishness to be found at the new Oscar Wilde Bar in New York City.

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Article · Review

Time: The Present

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I live in terror of not being misunderstood

—Arcane Allusions in The Importance of Being Earnest—

If Oscar Wilde really did live in terror of not being misunderstood—as he wrote in The Critic as Artist in 1891, he need not have worried. At least not so far as his plays are concerned, because there are parts of the texts now so arcane that they are almost bound to be misunderstood—if they are understood at all.

Take Wilde’s most famous play The Importance of Being Earnest. 

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Announcement · News · Review

Purple Prose

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—Book Review—
Beautiful and Impossible Things: Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde 

Notting Hill Editions, UK (2015) | New York Review Books, US (2017)”

…and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happen, of things that are not and that should be.”

So said Oscar Wilde in The Decay of Lying, one of the works included in Beautiful and Impossible Things, a new collection of essays plus the odd letter and lecture by Wilde, due for its U.S. release later this year.

Gyles Brandreth, the English writer, broadcaster, actor, and former Member of Parliament, has provided a solid Introduction to the book. Mr. Brandreth continues to bolster Wilde’s popularity in the U.K. and beyond, by efforts such as this, his being Honorary President of the Oscar Wilde Society in London, and not least by his successful Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries series of novels.

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News · Review

“Earnest in Town”

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Alanna J. Smith, Daniel Fredrick, Lauren Sowa, Mary Martello and Jake Blouch. Photo by Mark Garvin.
Alanna J. Smith, Daniel Fredrick, Lauren Sowa, Mary Martello and Jake Blouch. Photo by Mark Garvin
Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest
at the Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia

With its marble columns and lobby posters of productions past, the Walnut Street Theatre is a venerable venue that claims, dubiously, that Jefferson and Lafayette attending its opening night performance?1

Within the neoclassical Federal shell of the Walnut can often be found the kernel of fine scenic design, tasteful costumes, and knowledgeable subscribers. One imagines, therefore, that a sledgehammer would not be utilized in revealing itself. Unfortunately, such had been the case on my recent visits to witness the repertory’s assaults on Agatha Christie and Noel Coward. 

So it was more with a sense of duty and dread, than enthusiasm, that my band of Philadelphia Wildeans revisited the scene of those crimes to see The Importance of Being Earnest. 

Would the Wilde play be similarly executed?

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Article · Review

RBS

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When it comes to measuring time, sixty is an oddly benign number. It moves the seconds into minutes and the minutes into hours quite stealthily. But when the number is used to mark the passage of years—three score can give one quite a jolt. So when the occasion crept up on me last week, I was in need of rejuvenation.

An outing to the theatre would be the tonic I thought. But with the next Wilde play not until later in the month, I would need to find another balm for my (increasingly) furrowed brow.

What then if not Oscar? Perhaps something pre-Oscar…

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Review

Useful Editions

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Literary Metaphor at the Oscar Wilde Festival in Galway

Focused though I am on Oscar Wilde In America, I like to keep an eye on the bigger picture.

However, I know that to see the brushstrokes up close it is sometimes necessary to depart from topical and geographical constraints and visit the works themselves.

So last weekend I attended the Oscar Wilde Festival in Galway, Ireland, where I discovered part of the Wilde canvas rendered in two books with contrasting techniques.

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News · Review

Wilde Style

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To accompany the world premiere of the Morrison/Cox opera Oscar in Santa Fe, NM, this adapted excerpt from my book Oscar Wilde On Dress appeared in the Santa Fe New Mexican’s arts magazine Pasatiempo.

http://www.santafenewmexican.com/pasatiempo/music/classical_music/article_c776936c-f565-11e2-a96f-0019bb30f31a.html

For more on Wilde and dress see:
http://oscarwildeinamerica.org/works/philosophy-of-dress.html

© John Cooper, 2014.

Review

Conference: Legacy of Oscar Wilde

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Wilde Conference at Drew University, June 1-2, 2012
Who Owns The Legacy of Oscar Wilde?

A REVIEW
—by John Cooper—

So it was to Drew University (Madison, NJ) hopeful of enlightenment as to the nominal question posed by the conference.

To the question of who owns the legacy of an author in the public domain the answer is usually nobody. However, this conference was a reminder, should it be needed, that in the sphere of Wilde studies nobody often translates into anybody willing to marry the subject, for better or worse, to their own vision of Wilde. This is not surprising given Wilde’s dualities of nationality, gender and style, and over the years writers have enjoyed an open season and taken careful aim at their subject, giving us some quite specific visions of Oscar.

At least in a forum such as this the subject becomes a moving target. So we had varied questions, not only of the Irish Wilde and the gay Wilde, as might be expected, but also an array of topics ranging from thesis to the practical; subjects from Wilde’s reputation as a classicist to the ownership of his work and imagery.

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