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WRITING WILDE
IN EXTREMIS
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But as for this version of the story being “true”...well; no truth can be separated from the circumstances of its telling. A hundred years after his death, we find other truths in Wilde’s life and work than those found when he swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in the dock at the Old Bailey. We flatter ourselves that we read his story very differently to the jury who found him guilty, or to the newspaper editors who boosted their circulation on the back of lurid, moralising editorials, or to all those who approved of or revelled in his humiliation. We’ve put up a statue, given him a plaque in Westminster Abbey, adopted him as an icon, claimed him as a pioneer, studied him to death, republished him endlessly and made him one the very few above-the-title box office guarantee names of our entertainment industry. But I do not think we have understood him yet, or what was done to him. I don’t think we realise how much he is with us, rather than behind us.
Of all the details of this story, one image has stuck in my mind; Wilde and Mrs Robinson sitting alone in her room, silent, unobserved in the middle of a London night noisy with speculation, rumour and libel, the smug applause of theatres, the vicious gossip of hotel dining rooms. What I wanted to do was the impossible thing that only theatre can do; to put us in that room.
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