Celebrating Wilde’s ‘Ideal’ World

‘Handsome woman,” comments Lord Goring, offending the woman he is speaking to, but not of. “Please don’t praise other women in our presence,” the lady responds stiffly. “You might wait for us to do that!” Says Lord Goring, “I did wait.”

This is one of the many delicious exchanges in Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband,” a comedy of manners about politics, corruption and love, with lines polished to that faultless gleam that only Wilde could produce. The play, currently a hit on Broadway directed by Peter Hall, opens Friday at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, directed by Martin Benson and starring Philip Anglim as Lord Goring. In addition, L.A. Theatre Works and KCRW will record a radio version of the drama starring Jacqueline Bisset in January, to be broadcast on National Public Radio.

But beneath the glittering bons mots of “An Ideal Husband” lies a fragile and poignant document, a picture of how Wilde envisioned his own, ideal place in the society he observed so brilliantly. “An Ideal Husband” illustrates just how fully Wilde wanted, and indeed expected, to be petted and rewarded for his brilliance. But only five months after the play opened on the West End in January 1895, Wilde was sentenced to two years’ hard labor for indecency and sodomy. Prison and disgrace ended his career and he died soon afterward.

“With what a crash this fell!” wrote Wilde in April 1895, describing his demise. The great playwright was finally comprehending that all of his literary skill and clever remarks could not help him in a scandalous court battle that he was clearly losing. In a moment of bad judgment and hubris, Wilde had sued the Marquess of Queensberry over an insult. Queensberry had been infuriated by Wilde’s refusal to stop seeing his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, a petulant literary wannabe and father-hater. Wilde lost his suit and was then sued by the state for sodomy and indecency.

At the time, Wilde had two new plays in the West End, both among the most sparkling and epigrammatic ever written. “An Ideal Husband” opened Jan. 3, “The Importance of Being Earnest” on Valentine’s Day. The glory that these works brought Wilde was shockingly brief. In a grim foreshadowing of the day when Wilde’s wife, Constance, would change her name and the names of Wilde’s children, the theaters removed the playwright’s name from their marquees in April. Soon after, the plays closed altogether.

Wilde’s story, one of the sorriest--and most engrossing--tales of individual injustice in literary history, is well known and documented. “An Ideal Husband” offers insight into the tragic flaw of the doomed playwright. “Husband” represents the world as Wilde wanted it to be, the world he believed his genius could create. His tragedy was that he could only create it in the theater.

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The character who most clearly represents Wilde in “An Ideal Husband” is Lord Goring, a gentleman with just the kind of extraordinary insight and wit Wilde was famous for. Others describe Goring as a dandy, but Wilde describes him as “the first well-dressed philosopher in the history of thought.” Goring is not the protagonist of the piece, for he does not change. Like his epigrams, he is perfect right from the start.

But Goring is the play’s hero in that he pulls together all the strands of an intended political blackmail and saves the day for the play’s more conventional leads, Lord and Lady Chiltern. In return, he is rewarded with--after a witty and entirely sexless courtship--the hand of Lord Chiltern’s sister, Mabel, a young woman who can verbally spar with the best. Mabel is a perfect match for Goring--the exchange of banter seems to be her only desire.

Goring decides to wed only after being ordered to do so by his father, the authoritarian blowhard Lord Caversham. (Caversham is a de-fanged version of Queensberry, and if Queensberry had in fact turned out to be more like Caversham, we almost certainly would have had the pleasure of more plays from Wilde.) But Goring resists his father at first, if only because it is so pleasant to be an indolent, witty bachelor in society. Mabel understands this perfectly. When her sister-in-law Lady Chiltern asks Goring to be serious, Mabel offers him a perfect defense: “Don’t say such a dreadful thing to Lord Goring. Seriousness would be very unbecoming to him. . . . Pray be as trivial as you can.”

In “An Ideal Husband,” Wilde offers a world in which even the most villainous character is absurdly witty and clearheaded and even right in her observations. She is Mrs. Cheveley, a blackmailer who threatens to expose Goring’s great friend Lord Chiltern. Lord Chiltern, a symbol of political and moral integrity, sold a state secret as a young man, a scam that made him his fortune and his political career. Cheveley threatens to ruin his career if he does not help her by championing a cause he despises and one that will make her own fortune. She tells him why he is doomed if he does not help her, in a description of a political climate that coincides perfectly with our own time.

“Remember to what a point your Puritanism in England has brought you,” Mrs. Cheveley lectures Lord Chiltern. “In the old days nobody pretended to be a bit better than his neighbours. . . . Nowadays with our modern mania for morality, everyone has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues--and what is the result? You all go over like ninepins--one after the other.”

Advising Chiltern, Goring offers a similarly trenchant view of the modern populace: “If you did make a clean breast of the whole affair, you would never be able to talk morality again. And in England a man who can’t talk morality twice a week to a large popular immoral audience is quite over as a serious politician. . . . A confession would be of no use. It would ruin you.”

Goring and the villainess Cheveley share an ability to see through society’s shams; their difference is in the use they make of their clairvoyance. Goring’s credo, expressed to Lady Chiltern, is in fact a heartbreakingly beautiful one, particularly in light of Wilde’s impending tragedy, a tragedy whose presence he clearly felt as he was writing this play.

“I am not a Pessimist,” he tells Lady Chiltern. “Indeed I am not sure that I quite know what Pessimism really means. All I do know is that life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of the world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.”

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Unable to read the mood and moral tenor of his time in the way that Goring could, Wilde was very soon imprisoned, reviled by good society and conveniently forgotten by many of his friends. He would in fact be forced to contemplate life without much charity. He wrote two moving documents in the face of this: “De Profundis” and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” But he never again wrote anything witty and gleaming, and in fact he died three years after his release from prison, in 1900, at the age of 46.

Having once said that the secret of life is art, Wilde later changed his mind and said that he believed the secret of life is suffering. Checking out “An Ideal Husband” is an ideal way to celebrate Wilde’s first secret of life, the one that suited him best.

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“AN IDEAL HUSBAND,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, Dates: Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m., Saturday-Sunday, 2:30 p.m., Sunday, 7:30 p.m. Ends Oct. 6. Prices: $18-$41. Phone: (714) 957-4033. The live radio version will be recorded Jan. 22-25 at Doubletree Guest Suites, 1707 4th St., Santa Monica.$23-$26. (310) 827-0889.