Stage: Picture

of Oscar Wilde

comes to life.

By Bill Doll

Theater critic

Vincent Dowling, who spends most of his time as artistic director of the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, took himself from the wings to the stage Thursday night to introduce us to the wit and the pathos of Oscar Wilde in Michael MacLiammoir's "The Importance of Being Oscar."

By evening's end we know this enfant terrible of English letters in the 1890s intimately and sympathetically.

We had travelled with the fops of "The Importance of Being Ernest," the decadence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and into Wilde's private hell of his prison letters, "De Profundis.”

This is an oral biography, a telling of his life and a conveying of his stories and poems, not an attempt to recreate the person on stage, as, say, Hal Holbrook does with Mark Twain.

Yet, this sort of detached intimacy seems right, for MacLaimmoir's Wilde is man religiously devoted to feelings, but obsessed with keeping them at a civilized distance.

The sum of it is an absorbing, maybe at times too long, but often riveting piece of theater. It is theater that makes you work a bit. But every so often thinking can be fun.

One cannot help but marvel at the way Dowling, alone on the stage, can hold a thousand people in silent thrall as he did most especially when showing us the naked humiliation of Wilde in prison.

•

.

At the peak of his success, he is convicted of having homosexual relationship with a doltish young lord.

Imprisoned for two years, Wilde bears the most grotesque humiliations. Dowling's poet standing in prison garb in a public station with his guards and being jeered is a moment that doesn't leave you when you leave the theater.

Any man who could answer a customs declaration by saying "I have nothing to declare but my genius," could not tolerate being a victim such as this.

If the detachment that Dowling and his direc-

Vincent Dowling

tor, Roger Hendricks Simon, fashion fits the man, there is still an absence.

What is missing is a feeling of that voluptuousness, that "indolent Babylonian face," even of a sense of his extravagance.

"

This is not to say "The Importance of Being Oscar" isn't satisfying, for it is. It is crisp, often grabbing, and almost a century after the fact, gives us an Oscar Wilde whose portrait has come back to life. "The importance of Being Oscar" will be performed five more times this summer.