The Importance of Being Oscar – Theatre Royal Wakefield

Writer: Micheál Mac Liammóir

Director: Michael Fentiman

Micheál Mac Liammóir was, like Oscar Wilde, a gay Irish playwright – except that he wasn’t really. Despite Simon Callow’s delightful reminiscence of Mac Liammóir in his later years, the programme never makes really clear that he was born English to a family with no Irish connections, moved to Ireland, changed his name and reinvented himself as a true-born son of Cork. Also, unlike Wilde, he was most noted as an actor, playing Iago to Orson Welles’ Othello and running the Gate Theatre in Dublin for many years with his life-partner Hilton Edwards.

As you might expect, Mac Liammóir’s version of Wilde, which first surfaced in 1960, was distinctly flamboyant, as evidenced by a brief extract from his recording of the script played at the beginning. Alastair Whatley, Artistic Director of Original Theatre, co-producers (appropriately enough) with Reading Rep, takes a different tack. Michael Fentiman’s direction keeps him nearly motionless, in a circle of light, with a similar circle providing a mirror effect – or, in imagination, Dorian Gray’s portrait – and only stepping outside, dimly perceived in the darkness, for The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

Whatley’s diction is impeccably English, his approach mostly understated, with occasional bursts of righteous anger. When he assumes different characters, he is equally understated, hardly moving, characterising the two halves of a conversation with hints, rather than caricature. The effect was of a chamber performance, but a glance at the flyer gives no suggestion of studio performances in the dozen theatres on the tour.

However, he is totally in control of his material, running through Wilde’s triumphs in the first half until the disaster of his trial. He is amusing about Wilde’s playing to miners in the Wild West, brings out the eeriness of Dorian Gray and sails through the greatest of many great scenes in The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Bracknell’s interrogation of Jack as a potential suitor for Gwendolen (“A handbag!” delivered quickly, without fuss).

The whole business of both trials is much condensed, providing the prologue to a more serious second half. There are moments of humour, some very familiar (Ada Leverson’s account of Wilde’s initially triumphant return from prison, his obsession with his Parisian wallpaper), in one case very unfamiliar: Andre Gide’s account of him finding his permanent home in a French village, then quickly getting bored and fleeing from it.

But most of the second half is taken up with his two great works during/after his imprisonment. De Profundis – written as a letter – begins quietly, flames into anger against Lord Alfred Douglas and moves on to his spiritual development, whereas The Ballad of Reading Gaol is the highpoint of the evening, poetry, as Mac Liammóir puts it, stripped of ornament, delivered with superb intensity by Whatley.

Overall, this is an initially entertaining, then moving, evening, with Whatley casting a surprisingly sober regard in Oscar Wilde’s direction.

Reviewed on 8th June 2026. On tour until August.