Oscar Ballet — My impressions

Note: The photo is from a different ballet. I couldn’t stand the one they provide for ‘Oscar’. 😊

Oscar
The Australian Ballet
Regent theatre, Melbourne
13–24 September 2024
Choreography: Christopher Wheeldon

I attended a Melbourne performance of the ballet, Oscar. I can say that the dancing, the orchestra and the score were all of very high quality. However the performance failed to capture my interest. I believe this was because of faults in the plot as devised by the Choreographer, Christopher Wheeldon.

For a production that focuses on Wilde’s time in prison and his memories of better times, far too little was made of the prison scene which opens the piece. Here is an opportunity to portray the boredom and degradation of a gay offender in the British prison system. “Hard labour” consisted of many hours of pointless effort in walking a treadmill or picking oakum. “At first it was a fiendish nightmare; more horrible than anything I had ever dreamt of,” he later recalled. “[T]hey made me undress before them and get into some filthy water they called a bath and dry myself with a damp, brown rag and put on this livery of shame.” And, in De Profundis, we read Wilde’s words, “We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.” I have no idea how this could be conveyed by choreography, but that’s what choreographers are for.

The nice mattress on the cell bed stood out to me. What’s all this luxury about, I was asking myself. “During this month, he would sleep on a plank bed, a bare board raised a few inches above the floor, supplied with sheets, two rugs, a coverlet, but no mattress.” (Oscar Wilde, by Richard Ellmann) I will give the artistic director (anonymous on the Australian Ballet website) the benefit of the doubt that being too realistic would in this case be distracting.

I would have like to see the interaction between Wilde and his warder—the only other person in the world he was permitted contact with. A word from the warder, and Wilde had to obey.

The dance interpretation of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray had as a prop a wooden frame, inside of which we see an immobile dancer, representing the aging portrait. I was very surprised to see the dancer leap out of the picture and in fact morph into Oscar Wilde. What sort of tangled conceptual struggles does this involve? Why could not a dancer, or actor, remain in the frame and slowly become more and more grotesque and wizened, as required in Wilde’s story?

These plot convolutions become more tangled by having Wilde costumed in an unbuttoned shirt for much of the time, displaying the gym-shark physique of the actual dancer. I gave up trying to imagine what message Wheeldon might be conveying by this.

The Nightingale and the Rose scene lost me a bit because I never actually saw the nightingale pierce itself with the rose thorn. “[…] If one is trying to make a dramatic adaptation of a story or a novel—one has to find a way of translating that narrative into an equivalent dramatic action, and that will not be an easy job. Indeed, in some cases it may not even be possible,” The Art of the Playwright, by William Packard. What is difficult for dramatic adaptation, I suggest, is going to be even more of a challenge for choreographic adaptation. However, there is plenty of precedent. “[…] in 1952 Valerie Bettis choreographed A Streetcar Named Desire for the Slavenska-Franklin Ballet (later performed by American Ballet Theatre and Dance Theatre of Harlem), breaking new ground by using the symbolism and idiomatic language of dance to present a visually gripping take on the complex social themes of Tennessee Williams’ play,” Dance Magazine. I think that Wheeldon could have benefited by paying more respect to some of these precedents.

From time to time a squad of warders dressed in camouflage fatigues would march, in formation, across the stage. When does one ever see real prison warders in formation? Was this supposed to be the product of Wilde’s tormented mind? What did Wilde ever know of camouflage fatigues? This was yet another nail in the coffin of the production.

The performance ended with a postscript in the form of, wait for it, a quote by the Narrator of a sonnet (if I remember rightly) by Bosie. This is so bad. Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas) was the little psychopath with whom Wilde become besottted. This Bosie blighted Wilde’s life in so many ways. Terrible to give him the final word. Is Bosie a literary talent? Wilde “lavished praise on him and his ‘lovely’ sonnets.” However, at a later time, Wilde proposed that Douglas should translate his Salome, which he had written in French, for the English edition. However, “Wilde had not reckoned with his beloved’s inadequate French, [and] found the result unacceptable.” (Ellmann ibid) —What an unfortunate faux pas.