Why can’t he listen to good advice? That is the question hovering over David Hare’s two act play about the fall of Oscar Wilde, "The Judas Kiss." In 1895, Wilde sued the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, for calling him “a posing sodomite.” Wilde lost, was forced to pay Queensbeery's legal fees, and was convicted of “gross indecency” with men, a prisonable offense in Victorian England. With his arrest looming, rather than flee to France, as other similarly fated artists had successfully done, Wilde checked into his favorite hotel and waited for his punishment.
On June 12th at 2 p.m., I attended the final performance of "The Judas Kiss" at The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theatre. Roughly eight hours earlier Omar Mateen’s rampage ended. I woke up around 7, and the death toll was reportedly 20. A few hours later, it was confirmed to be 50. The news blared as I prepared to see a play partially about one of the most notorious cases of persecution of homosexuality.
The connection and coincidence were so obvious they risked becoming trite. Still, the hours leading up to "The Judas Kiss" had special resonance. At 2 p.m., an announcer somberly dedicated the performance to the victims in Orlando, and then the curtain raised, right on time.
In that lovely hotel room, Robbie, Oscar Wilde’s closest confidant, and former lover, implores him to listen to reason and escape. The noose is tightening, the police will soon be at the door, yet Oscar-magnificently embodied by Rupert Everett-refuses to budge with characteristically confounding wit: “If I run now, my story is finished, for as long as I stay it is not at an end. I prefer my story unfinished.” Oscar also refuses to leave the poisonous “Bosie,” (Douglas/Judas) despite he being the impetus behind the lawsuit and imminent downfall. Why? The dialogue is worthy of the subject and Hare’s Wilde finds the cleverest ways of saying: I have my reasons and your advice is worthless.
In Act II, we find Oscar, Bosie and an Italian rentboy in a run down shack in Italy. Oscar, left poor and wrecked by two years of jail and hard labor, sits stoically in a chair center stage, crafting the same sublime jokes and aphorisms while his Judas pouts and “Galileo” reclines naked on the floor.
Boise urges Oscar to continue the fight for “Greek Love.” The time has come for an advocate, and who better than the language’s greatest wit? Oscar evades, brilliantly. Why do anything? Why do anything but sit in this chair?
Undeterred, Boise unblinkingly changes course. He assures this is only a phase for him, his dalliances with men, before the inevitable marriage and reconciliation with his family and their nemesis, The Marquees. Besides, his life is only beginning, Oscar’s well past its middle. Why should they both be swallowed by poverty and infamy?
Does Oscar protest? Hardly. What will be will be? Boise leaves, first with Galileo to go dancing, later for good, but not until Oscar has had his Judas kiss. The last striking image is of Oscar staring through his only window, alone, his face bathed by the setting sun. Another two years of destitution wait, before death at 46 in 1900.
The conflict between tolerance and bigotry was glaring as I left the theater. But, a murkier conflict stewed beneath it: Individualism and its correlatives, self-expression, and self-acceptance, vs utter conformity and its correlatives, self-denial and self-hatred. By Individualism I do not mean the gluttonous, property obsessed philosophy espoused by Ayn Rand, Et all., but Individualism as defined by Oscar Wilde in his essay, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism":
"Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb the monotony of type, slavery of custom, the tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. It seeks to show new perspectives and other choices. It is a way to help expand and liberate the consciousness; our experiences, understandings, imaginings, options and thereby our lives."
Oscar Wilde is a problematic gay martyr. After all, when accused of homosexual acts, he proclaimed his “innocence” while teasing his “guilt.” Hare hastens to point out in an interview in the production’s playbill that Wilde’s cherished “Greek Love” (essentially pederasty), is still taboo. But, as an exemplar of individualism, of the refusal to not think for oneself no matter the cost, Oscar Wilde endures. In a world where so many violently deny what is uniquely natural in themselves and others, Oscar Wilde’s individualism remains a beacon.
