reviews of An Ideal husband

The first thing to be said about Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1895) is that it isn’t in the same league as The Importance of Being Earnest, as close as English high comedy has ever come to perfection.

The second is that it is nevertheless hugely entertaining, a curious mixture of melodrama, Wilde’s distinctive epigrammatic wit and sudden moments of deeper feeling.

For beyond the jokes, the plot twists and the blackmailing scarlet woman, there is little doubt that Wilde put a lot of himself and his own experience into this play about a rising politician faced with the prospect of ruin.

When he wrote it, Wilde was already being blackmailed by rent boys, and the Marquess of Queensberry was lurking ominously in the wings. Before the play’s run was over, Wilde had been arrested and Reading Gaol awaited him. As Wilde wrote in his last years, “some of its passages seem prophetic of tragedies to come”.

When the rising politician, Sir Robert Chiltern realises that he is about to be revealed as a man who founded his career and personal fortune by selling confidential Government information, and describes a terror “as if one’s heart were beating itself to death in some empty hollow”, you surely hear the appalled voice of a writer who had been through such hell.

Telegraph

The Stage

Wilde's play used to be seen as a second-rate melodrama festooned with dazzling epigrams. But Peter Hall's landmark 1992 production asked us to take it seriously. And, even if Lindsay Posner's current revival is not quite on that level, it offers a good evening and reminds us that Wilde's wit masked a vision of life.

The play is unmistakably an attack on late-Victorian values. Its hero, Sir Robert Chiltern, is a rising political star whose twin gods are wealth and power. We discover, however, that in pursuit of them as a young man he rashly sold cabinet secrets to a stock-exchange speculator: a mistake that comes back to haunt him when an incriminating letter falls into the hands of the blackmailing Mrs Cheveley. But, if Sir Robert represents the hollow sham of public life, his adoring wife symbolises what Shaw called "the mechanised idealism of the stupidly good". The wisest words in the play are spoken by Viscount Goring, a dandified idler who recognises that life cannot be understood without charity and forgiveness.

Wilde's plot may be full of awkward contrivances but Posner's production does full justice to its genuine substance. Alexander Hanson brings out the posturing element in Chiltern's public virtue and his corresponding rage when his dark secret is revealed: there is real force in the scene where he turns on his over-idealising wife to announce that she has ruined him. And Rachael Stirling is equally powerful as the wife who realises she has worshipped a false idol and has to learn to live with human flaws. Samantha Bond as the blackmailing Mrs Cheveley also looks handsome as hell in her silken gowns and makes this dubious predator an instrument of truth.

What you might call the Ibsenite side of Wilde's play, which involves exposing a marital life-lie, comes across excellently. Strangely enough, it is the verbal comedy that sometimes seems a little plodding. Elliot Cowan captures well the underlying sanity and goodness of Viscount Goring. But, in playing against the idea that he is simply an effete word-juggler, he loses some of the vital laughs.

Heretical as it may be to say so, some of Wilde's comic riffs even come to seem a bit tiresome. There's a long passage in the second act when an elderly aristo, although well played by Caroline Blakiston, fires off her views about politics and society in a way that simply brings the play grinding to a halt. The point about Wilde is that he expresses his philosophy of life through the melodramatic action. When Posner's production focuses on that it is at its best. And, at the climax as everything is resolved, one is reminded of the paradoxical truth of Borges's remark that "the fundamental flavour of Wilde's work is happiness".