Download WILDE ABOUT HENRY

May I Say Nothing?
December 2016
Oscar Wilde at the Shaw Festival (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada)
Heather Marcovitch
Canada’s Shaw Festival, a summer repertory theatre whose production mandate focuses primarily on the works
f George Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries, has been held in the town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, since
962.1 In the over fifty years since the festival’s inception, productions of plays by Noel Coward, Sean O’Casey,
nd John Millington Synge have been mounted repeatedly. But one playwright, Shaw’s early contemporary Oscar
Wilde, has had a more irregular history at the festival. As has been noted widely, the two playwrights have much
n common. Both were Irish, both interested in socialism (although Wilde’s dabbling with the Fabian Society was
owhere near Shaw’s firmer commitment), and both were admirers of Ibsen’s socially-critical dramas. Yet despite
he connections between the two playwrights, Wilde was a latecomer to the Shaw Festival roster. In fact, the festival
ad been underway for twenty-five years before a Wilde play was produced, and while Wilde’s comedies are
owadays produced on a regular basis, they fulfill a period drama niche that seems to act as a counterpoint to the
more modern productions. As well, critical reviews of Wilde’s plays have often admonished productions for not
eing properly Wildean or not Wildean enough, a point of view which brings up questions of Wilde’s function in
heatre and the misidentification of his plays as witty Victorian trifles. This essay will look at the history of Wilde’s
2
lays at the Shaw Festival and the accompanying critical tensions that often resulted from the insistence on a
olitely Victorian Oscar Wilde.
ar from being the picturesque little town it is known as today, in 1962 Niagara-on-the-Lake had a reputation as
eing “quite a dead little town,” in the words of Dorothy Middleditch, one of the founders of the festival (Connolly
). Three residents, Calvin Rand, a professor of philosophy at the then-University of Buffalo who commuted from
Canada, Middleditch, and Brian Doherty, a Toronto lawyer who had moved to Niagara-on-the-Lake, met to
iscuss starting a repertory theatre festival along the lines of the successful Shakespeare festival in Stratford,
Ontario, which had been already running for a decade (Connolly 9). L.W. Connolly, the theatre historian of the
haw Festival, notes that when the festival was first being conceived, and organizers were discussing which
laywright would serve as its public face, Wilde was among those mentioned, along with Eugene O’Neill,
omerset Maugham, and, possibly as competition to the Stratford Festival, Christopher Marlowe (Connolly 11).
However, Doherty argued that these writers did not have enough of a body of work to justify naming the entire
estival after them. So George Bernard Shaw, with his prodigious output, was chosen as the namesake for the
estival. Originally, the mandate was to produce nothing but plays by Shaw and for its first few years, productions
were indeed limited to Shaw titles. In 1965, however, Sean O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman was also produced;
he rationale was that Shaw’s close friendship with O’Casey merited the latter playwright’s inclusion in the festival,
ut Connolly argues it was a personal choice, based on the associate director Sean Mulcahy’s liking of O’Casey’s
work (Connolly 16).
With the inclusion of O’Casey, some Toronto theatre critics began to speculate whether the mandate would be
roadened to include playwrights such as Wilde (Connolly 16). These critics tended to focus on Shaw’s Irish
ationality, but in 1967 when the mandate was officially broadened, the focus of inclusion was on plays that were
ither written or produced during Shaw’s lifetime (1856-1950). Nonetheless, despite the mention of Wilde as a
ossible namesake, no Wilde play was produced at the Shaw Festival until 1987. The reasons for this are unknown,
ut likely Wilde’s plays were casualties of the particular tastes or agendas of the various artistic directors. We have
lready seen that O’Casey’s inclusion was due to Mulcahy’s preferences. Paxton Whitehead, the well-known
ritish character actor who served as the festival’s artistic director from 1967 to 1977, had a preference for farces,
uch as Ferenc Molnár’s 1910 comedy The Guardsman, or the screwball comedies of Noel Coward, who became the
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econd-most produced playwright at the festival (and whose plays bear the influence of Oscar Wilde’s comedies).
Coward’s work, set in the twentieth century and leaning towards the absurd, seemed to give the festival a modern
ounterpoint to Shaw’s Victorian- and Edwardian-era plays.
However, Whitehead did bring Micheál MacLiammóir’s one-man show about Wilde, The Importance of Being Oscar,
o the festival in 1968. MacLiammóir was a famous Irish stage actor who was also known for having been the
mentor of a young Orson Welles. His play, part biographical essay and part recitation of excerpts from Wilde’s
most famous works, had debuted in Dublin in 1964 and by 1968 was an international success and had been
roadcast on the BBC. The Importance of Being Oscar capitalized on the revived interest in Oscar Wilde in the 1960s
nd the two sensationalized films that preceded this play, Oscar Wilde starring Robert Morley (1960) and The Trials
f Oscar Wilde starring Peter Finch (1960).
Nowadays, The Importance of Being Oscar might strike modern audiences used to more contemporary adaptations
f Wilde’s life as quaint and a little prudish. Unlike more recent dramas such as Brian Gilbert’s film Wilde (1997)
r Moisés Kaufman’s play Gross Indecency (1997), MacLiammóir presents us with a sexually ambiguous Oscar
Wilde. MacLiammóir’s readings depict Wilde as a consummate aesthete and poet; his emotive readings of
assages from The Picture of Dorian Gray and several of Wilde’s poems and fairy tales construct a Wilde as a last
Romantic in the most romantic sense of the word, but also as an innocent whose life lived in art prepares him badly
or his trial and imprisonment. He also overromanticizes Wilde’s friendship with the actress Lillie Langtry,
mplying a closer relationship than the two had, and certainly hyperbolizes his marriage to Constance. Wilde’s
omosexuality, his affairs with Robert Ross and John Gray, and their impact on his artistic development, are not
mentioned. More pointedly, his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas is referred to euphemistically as a
friendship” and details are scrupulously avoided. Given the period, though, it is not unusual that MacLiammóir
s cagey about Wilde’s homosexuality; even the films mentioned above, despite their sensationalized
dvertisements, dodged the subject. In England, the Lord Chamberlain’s office held the power to censor plays until
968 and overt mentions of homosexuality were sufficient grounds for delicensing a dramatic work from stage or
inematic production. For MacLiammóir, gay himself and more or less out in the theatre world, the coyness is
kely more expedient than ideological. The Wilde he presents to his audience is indeed an exceedingly polite
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Victorian with a taste for the beautiful, something that in itself might be unremarkable, but it fits an ongoing
ssumption of Wilde and the literature he produced.
Despite the success of The Importance of Being Oscar, almost twenty years elapsed before an Oscar Wilde play was
roduced at the Shaw Festival.2 The notion of a Victorian Oscar might be partially responsible for this. Whitehead,
he artistic director whose tenure spanned most of the 1970s, scheduled no actual Victorian-era plays; Max
eerbohm and J.M. Barrie were represented, but by their twentieth-century works, and there was a lone musical
daptation of Lady Audley’s Secret. Christopher Newton, the artistic director from 1980 to 2002, eventually began to
tage Wilde’s plays, but the choice for the first production of an Oscar Wilde play in the 1987 Shaw season was a
urious one—Salomé, as part of the festival’s Risk series, dedicated to unproduced and experimental work during
haw’s lifetime.3 A new adaptation was written and directed by Sky Gilbert, a queer theorist and drag artist based
n Canada, who set Salomé in the World War Two years, using as a contextual reference the collaboration of
thiopian leader Ras Hailu with Mussolini in 1940.
Gilbert’s production notes indicate his intention to not only modernize the play but to align it with contemporary
ational and queer politics. To begin with, in his preface to his adaptation, he freely admits to the removal of all
iblical language with the exception of Iokanaan’s lines (he uses Wilde’s original French names for the characters).
Gilbert explains his adaptation as a combination of naturalism and decadence. Naturalism, he explains, is
xemplified by Iokanaan’s faith in the coming of Christ and Salomé’s love of Iokanaan; decadence is depicted by
he use of new technologies, particularly video, and by the simultaneous speeches and movements of characters
e renames the Narcissistic Twins (formerly Narraboth and the Syrian) and the Theologians, who replace the
ickering Jewish groups of Wilde’s original. As he concludes in his preface, “With careful use of a combination of
aturalism and stylization I think we can bring Wilde’s gorgeous lush sexy script to life, a script which is especially
elevant nowadays during the AIDS crisis, since it is about a woman who loves in the face of danger, in the face of
eath and a prophet who does the same” (Gilbert prod. notes). In the notes he distributed to the cast members,
which include a chapter on Ethiopia from an anthropology textbook, Gilbert seems especially interested in the
alue placed on self-reliance and independence. He sees his Salomé as a tragic heroine, rather than the stereotypical
5
emme fatale, possibly linking the pejorative attitudes towards her sexual assertiveness with homophobic
resumptions about gay men’s sexuality.4
Reviews for Salomé were negative. Gilbert’s queer interpretation of an already arguably queer play seemed to have
arred many of the reviewers expecting a more faithful (or possibly a Cecil B. DeMille) interpretation of the Biblical
tory. Typical of the reviewers’ tenor are the criticisms of syndicated drama critic Jamie Portman who complained,
The soldiers look like bouncers in a sado-masochistic leather bar. Males lurk in dark corners fondling each other.
alomé . . . strips down to black bra and garter belt before asking for the prophet’s head, which then arrives in the
orm of an image on a TV monitor which she passionately kisses” (Portman, Salomé). He concludes by calling
Gilbert “a director who seriously considers his self-indulgent travesty to be a meaningful comment on the human
ondition” (Portman, Salomé). While Portman is especially savage, other reviewers were not much kinder. Ray
Conlogue of Toronto’s Globe and Mail also points to the sexual imagery in the play and chastises Gilbert for
making the sexuality of Salomé exclusively homosexual, commenting, “Whatever kind of flamboyant decadent
Wilde may have been, leather bars and pelvic slouching were not his style. By imposing them on the play, Gilbert
liminates its lyricism” (Conlogue). His criticisms also extend to the play itself, and to Strindberg’s Playing with
ire. “In other words,” he concludes, “these are not good plays that are neglected or uncommercial or inaccessible
ut still have artistic validity. They are merely strange and misshapen and probably bad” (Conlogue). Regardless
f what one might think about Gilbert’s choices, it is difficult, thirty years on, not to be struck by the homophobia
n some of these comments. The grave sin appears to be to these critics (and others, including those from the Buffalo
News, the Hamilton [Ontario] Spectator, and the London [Ontario] Free Press) not just that Gilbert imposed a different
irectorial vision of the play, but that his vision was so relentlessly contemporary, so out in terms of queer
exuality, and so different from the corseted Victorian (or Hollywood) drama that the name Wilde still connoted
n the 1980s to conventional critics and audiences.
alomé was never produced at the Shaw Festival again and another seven years passed before a Wilde play, this
me one of his comedies, was produced. From this point on, though, Wilde’s comedies were lavishly staged as a
ounterpoint to the often comparatively sparse productions of modernist dramas. Wilde at the Shaw became a
ymbol of Victorian-ness, and especially of period drama aimed at pleasing the crowds. An Ideal Husband was
roduced in 1995, coincidentally the centenary of the original production, and after its box-office success his
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omedies were staged regularly at the festival. The 1995 production drew mixed reviews, as became customary for
Wilde comedies. Jamie Portman had cultivated a reputation in Canadian theatre as a broadly liberal humanist critic
Day 268), but he is clearly not a fan of Wilde’s work and seems to miss the Ibsenism of An Ideal Husband,
omplaining about the play’s uneasy mix of wit and melodrama, particularly when he surmises that the play takes
turn for the worse once the dialogue becomes serious. Portman dismisses the production as being too one-note,
he actors shrieking their lines, and the incidental music by Rachmaninoff and Gorecki too heavy-handed for a
omedy (Portman, “Mangled Wilde Play”). And Terry Doran of The Buffalo News, frustrated by his inability to
ategorize the play as either drama or comedy, and seemingly unwilling to entertain the notion that it can be both
an odd stance to take given that the festival’s namesake wrote a number of plays that combined genres), makes
he comment that Wilde was “only semi-capable of writing seriously” until his trials (Doran). The presumption of
Wilde as the shallow entertainer until his imprisonment was so entrenched in the critical understanding of his
lays that it appears that very little could have been done to sway the reviewers.
Of course, it is arguable whether or not the direction of Wilde’s comedies displayed some difficulty in balancing
Wilde’s comedic writing with his social criticisms. And in fairness to the critics of the 1995 production of An Ideal
Husband, Duncan McIntosh’s direction was not without its flaws or its peculiar directorial choices. He chooses to
pen the play on a grave note, with a recitation of a verse from The Ballad of Reading Gaol:
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
he closing voiceover is from De Profundis: “If you want an inscription to read at dawn and at night-time, and for
leasure or for pain, write up on the walls of your house in letters for the sun to gild and the moon to silver,
Whatever happens to oneself happens to another.’”5 This might have inspired Terry Doran’s comment on Wilde’s
eriousness, and it does frame the play as being more heavy-handed than it might otherwise be perceived.
McIntosh also makes curious staging choices, such as having characters like Robert, Gertrude, and Mrs. Cheveley
egin their scenes with their backs to the audience in otherwise conventional fourth-wall staging. Robert, played
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n a somewhat snarly fashion by Norman Browning, is saturnine and defensive, especially to Lord Goring, and
oes not engender much sympathy. However, McIntosh manages to have Lord Goring get away with his troubling
peech to Gertrude: “A man’s life is of more value than a woman’s. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater
mbitions. A woman’s life revolves in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man’s life progresses.”
In the production, Lord Goring inserts “Nowadays” before he begins this portion of his speech, historicizing it,
nd offering a plausible (although by no means completely convincing) defense of the lines.
Despite the critics mostly panning An Ideal Husband, the show played close to capacity for its forty-two
erformances and was the bestselling play of the 1995 season, so much so that it was revived the following year
Connolly 153). McIntosh would direct An Ideal Husband once more in 2010. It suggested that Wilde’s comedies
were more or less critic-proof, since An Ideal Husband’s success was repeated by A Woman of No Importance in 2000,
irected by Susan Ferley, which also, despite receiving mixed to negative reviews, earned ninety-seven per cent of
s box office (Connolly 176).
etween An Ideal Husband and A Woman of No Importance came a production of Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1998,
irected by the festival’s artistic director Christopher Newton. By the late 1990s, the BBC adaptations of Regency
nd Victorian texts such as Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice and Vanity Fair had become quite popular with
middlebrow audiences, not the least due to the teleplays written by Andrew Davies. Along with the increased
roduction values (prior to the 1990s, it was common for these adaptations to be filmed statically on a soundstage),
Davies’ teleplays included shots of the lower classes as a counterpoint to the novels’ plots which focused on the
entry and the comfortable middle class. There is a clear influence of Davies’ work on Newton’s direction of Lady
Windermere’s Fan. During a musical overture to the play, he stages the servants at work, a choice that also evokes
he work of stagecraft, since the servants cleaning and readying the room for the action to begin taking place is
lso the work of setting the stage so that the actors can deliver their lines (Lady Windermere’s Fan).
he play takes place on an elaborate roundabout stage (designed by William Schmuck), with Viennese waltzes
roviding incidental music as the stage turns to change scenes, and evokes as well the 1950 film La Ronde, Max
Ophüls adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1897 play Riegen (translated in English as The Blue Room), where a subplot
etween two characters gets passed to the next set of characters by an acquaintance or by a chance meeting. The
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ssociation between characters here highlights the similarities between Schnitzler’s play and Lady Windermere’s
an, in which the fan becomes tied to Lady Windermere’s misunderstanding of her husband and near-indiscretion,
s well as her mother’s sacrifice of her reputation.
he social scene at the beginning of the play, a mise en scène Wilde repeats in both A Woman of No Importance and
An Ideal Husband, integrates a sizable cast of minor characters through these associations. At the beginning of Act
One, the arrival of Lord Darlington and his unrequited passion for Lady Windermere is followed by the
matchmaking Duchess of Berwick and her daughter Agatha. The relationships implied here—Darlington’s
oolhardy, idealistic love contrasted with the Duchess’ mercenary intentions that her daughter make a socially
dvantageous marriage—culminates in Lord Windermere’s insistence that his wife receive the adventuress Mrs.
rlynne at her birthday party. Mrs. Erlynne is portrayed as a mix of these two impulses, the foolish passion that
aused her to abandon her family and the hard practicality that necessitates her social survival, which leads her to
he volatile decision to see her daughter again. The staging of these characters on the roundabout stage makes the
ssociations between them both evident and fluid.
Whether or not Newton had La Ronde specifically in mind, the dramatic signification of the roundabout stage was
kely not lost on him, and indeed, because of the skill and timing required, was the one thing consistently praised
y critics. Remarkable in this production as well was that the dialogue was rendered almost verbatim to the
ublished edition without any attempt to modernize or abridge the dialogue. The critics responded favourably to
he production; the consensus was that Newton did an admirable job of taking a fairly insubstantial play and
mproving it by means of his lavish cinematic staging.6 What is particularly interesting about many of the critical
omments of both Lady Windermere’s Fan and An Ideal Husband is the critics’ recourse to Wilde as a particular
rand; the expectation, regardless of the play or the production, is that the audience must encounter an abundance
f epigrammatic wit. Like the reviews of An Ideal Husband, the critics reviewing Lady Windermere’s Fan, while
verall more agreeable, could not resist inserting comments about Wilde’s “trademark wit” and whether or not
he melodramatic plot was an obstacle to the consumption of his epigrams. Mira Friedlander of Variety cryptically
omments, “It’s not until the third act that ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ begins to feel like an Oscar Wilde play; up
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ntil then it’s three parts melodrama and one part comedy of manners,” without explaining how her ideal of an
Oscar Wilde play varies from the above analysis (Friedlander).
Kate Taylor’s review in the Globe and Mail of the 2000 production of A Woman of No Importance argues that no
ompany would put on this play unless it has an institutional commitment to staging the Wilde corpus (Taylor).
ut the performance highlighted the topical aspects of the New Woman and especially of the New Life Movement’s
uest for those wide-open, often American spaces, which signifies the opportunity to reform a society outside of
he stultifying British social norms. It is a perpetually underrated play but the earnestness of the production,
espite an uncharismatic Lord Illingworth, works in its favour by emphasizing its gender and social politics in
oth the repartee of Lady Caroline and Mrs Allonby and in the melodrama of Mrs Arbuthnot’s plotline (A Woman
f No Importance).
he productions of Wilde’s plays seem to present a challenge to each director in the delicate balance of the witty
anter expected of a Wilde comedy and the political or social arguments that provide the typically serious drama.
he production of The Importance of Being Earnest in 2004 unfortunately suffered from overemphasizing the satire
t the expense of the comedy. The actors tended to shriek their lines for emphasis and the repartee was weighed
own with line readings of disproportionate gravitas. It was among one of the least funny productions of the play
The Importance of Being Earnest).
n recent years, both Lady Windermere’s Fan (in 2013) and A Woman of No Importance (in the summer of 2016) have
een revived. J. Kelly Nestruck of the Globe and Mail reviewed Lady Windermere’s Fan highly, writing that “This is
Wilde as you’re not likely to have seen or heard him before – dark and wrenching as well as witty, with stunning
ets inspired by Impressionist paintings by John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt, clever staging ideas borrowed
rom Cirque du Soleil and Vancouver’s Electric Company Theatre, and a soundtrack that ranges from Rufus
Wainwright to The Velvet Underground” (Nestruck). John Law of The Niagara Falls Review, however, reiterates the
oint of view held by many critics that A Woman of No Importance is Wilde’s weakest play and claims that the
roduction never rises above melodrama and sentimentality (Law).
Despite their late arrival to the Shaw Festival, Wilde’s plays have proven to be extremely popular, ensuring their
ontinued presence there. But with this popularity comes the possibility that his plays will be produced as museum
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ieces, period dramas where the spectacle of Wilde’s wit and the Victorian setting prevent sustained dramatic
ngagement with the modern elements of the comedies, such as the influence of Ibsen or the theatre of the absurd.
Moreover, it is unlikely in this theatrical framework that Salomé will be produced again, although it, as well as
ome of the more contemporary biodramas of Wilde, such as The Judas Kiss or Gross Indecency, would
omplement the Festival’s mandate. (The Festival has allowed more contemporary works to be staged for some
me now.) Perhaps, at some point, there will be a more innovative production of one of Wilde’s plays. Or, perhaps,
he modern elements of the plays will present themselves despite the tendency to stage them as period dramas.
ut the continued productions have cemented Wilde as an important part of the Shaw Festival’s ongoing roster of
lays.
Works Cited
Conlogue, Ray. “When Taking a Risk Means Playing with Fire.” The Globe and Mail. August 1987. N.p. The L.W.
Connolly Theatre Archives, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
Connolly, L.W. The Shaw Festival: The First Fifty Years. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Day, Moira. “The Classical Humanist: Jamie Portman at the Calgary Herald, 1959-1975, and the Southam News
errvice, 1975-1987.” In Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism, edited by Anton Wagner.
oronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. 268-90.
Doran, Terry. “In Oscar Wilde Play, Humour and Absurdity.” The Buffalo News, 13 July 1995. N.p. The L.W.
Connolly Theatre Archives, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
riedlander, Mira. Review of Lady Windermere’s Fan. Variety, 1998. N.p. The L.W. Connolly Theatre Archives,
University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
Gilbert, Sky. Preface to Salomé Production Notes. The L.W. Connolly Theatre Archives, University of Guelph,
Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
11
An Ideal Husband (videotape), directed by Duncan McIntosh, Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lake, 1995. Viewed
with permission by the Shaw Festival and the L.W. Connolly Theatre Archives, University of Guelph.
he Importance of Being Earnest (videotape), directed by Christopher Newton, Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lake,
004. Viewed with permission by the Shaw Festival and the L.W. Connolly Theatre Archives, University of Guelph.
ady Windermere’s Fan (videotape), directed by Christopher Newton, Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lake,1998.
Viewed with permission by the Shaw Festival and the L.W. Connolly Theatre Archives, University of Guelph.
aw, John. “Woman of No Importance is some Weak Wilde at Shaw.”
ttp://www.niagarafallsreview.ca/2016/06/28/woman-of-no-importance-is-some-weak-wilde-at-shaw.
Niagara Falls Review.ca.
Accessed 28 November
016.
Nestruck, J. Kelly. “Lady Windermere’s Fan an Essential Stop at the Shaw Festival This Summer.” The Globe and
Mail.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/summer-entertainment/lady-windermeres-fan-an-essential-stop-at-the-shaw-festival-
his-summer/article12446018/.
Accessed 28 November 2016.
ortman, Jamie. “Mangled Wilde Play Tortures Audience.” The Kitchener-Waterloo Record, 15 July 1995. N.p. The
.W. Connolly Theatre Archives, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
. “Shaw Version of Salomé Campy and Self-Indulgent.” The Windsor Star, 18 August 1987. N.p. The L.W.
Connolly Theatre Archives, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
alomé (videotape), directed by Sky Gilbert, Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada, 1987. Viewed
with permission by the Shaw Festival and the L.W. Connolly Theatre Archives, University of Guelph, Guelph,
Ontario, Canada.
aylor, Kate. “An Easy-Going Coward, A Less Important Wilde.” The Globe and Mail, 29 May 2000. N.p. The L.W.
Connolly Theatre Archives, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
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Wagner, Vit. “’Fan’ Little More Than a Trifle.” The Toronto Star, 1998. N.p. The L.W. Connolly Theatre Archives,
University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
A Woman of No Importance (videotape), directed by Susan Ferley, Shaw Fesitval, Niagara-on-the-Lake, 2000. Viewed
with permission by the Shaw Festival and the L.W. Connolly Theatre Archives, University of Guelph.
 Heather Marcovitch is Continuous Instructor of English at Red Deer College in Alberta, Canada. She is th
author of The Art of the Pose: Oscar Wilde’s Performance Theory as well as articles about Wilde and other fin-de
siècle figures.
APPENDIX
PLAY
DIRECTOR
DESIGNER
DATE
The Importance of Being Oscar*
Hilton Edwards
1968
Salomé
Sky Gilbert
Terry Nicholls
1987
An Ideal Husband
Duncan McIntosh
William Schmuck
1995
An Ideal Husband
Duncan McIntosh
William Schmuck
1996
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Christopher Newton
William Schmuck
1998
A Woman of No Importance
Susan Ferley
William Schmuck
2000
The Importance of being Earnest
Christopher Newton
Judith Bowden
2004
An Ideal Husband
Richard Monette
Michael Gianfrancesco
2007
An Ideal Husband
Jackie Maxwell
Judith Bowden
2010
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Peter Hinton
Teresa Przyblyski
2013
13
A Woman of No Importance
Eda Holmes
Michael Gianfrancesco
2016
WILDE TALES, stories for young and old by Oscar Wilde, adapted for the stage by Kate Hennig,
is planned for the 2017 season
* Michéal Mac Liammoir’s one-man show.
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1
Located close to the southern border of
Ontario and with a population just over
15,000, Niagara-on-the-Lake is within
driving distance from several northern
and midwestern American cities. The
closest cities are Toronto, within a twohour drive, and nearby Buffalo, New York.
The famous Niagara Falls, both the
Canadian and the American sides, are a
little more than twenty kilometres away.
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2
By contrast, during this period the
Stratford Festival staged The Importance of
Being Earnest in 1975, 1976, and 1979.
3
August Strindberg’s Playing with Fire was
also produced that season as part of the
series.
4
Permission for viewing all videotapes of
Shaw
Festival
theatre
productions
courtesy of the Shaw Festival.
5
The quotation used in the play is taken
from the 1905 abridged version of De
Profundis and the reference to Bosie is cut
out of the passage.
6
Vit Wagner of the Toronto Star comments
on
the
relative
Windermere’s
Fan,
slightness
of
especially
compared to An Ideal Husband.
Lady
when