Oscar on my mind....

Sitting in on a rehearsal the other night in preparation for Rapture in Three Keys, I began to think about a superb novel by A.S.Byatt, The Children's Book, which I read in recent years. It's a book to cherish in the memory, documenting as it does the period from about 1880-1914, the period of the rise of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Golden Age of Children's Literature (the narrator is a woman who writes for and about her children), the building of the Victoria & Albert, the trial of Oscar Wilde, the first-wave of feminists, and the first generation of sexologists, and much much more. As well as being ferociously well-researched, it's a tender book, but one which makes much of the contrasts of what writers like Barry and Lewis Carroll had as their ideal of childhood, and its inevitable crushing by Experience.

The rehearsal, of course, was bringing to life Oscar's tales written for his beloved sons Cyril and Vyvyan. Cyril, like many of the young men of the Byatt novel, did not survive the war, but Vyvyan did, and his son Merlin was to become one of the torchbearers for Wilde in the period of occlusion and beyond. The stories give a whole new perspective on the complex creature that is Wilde. They give miraculous insight into the depth of his love for his children, which is all the more moving when one knows, in retrospect of course,  that Wilde, once incarcerated, did not see his children again, though he longed to. I suspect that the stories may have been Vyvyan's lifeline to the father he never had. Something has to explain his subsequent advocacy for him. 

The first of the stories we will perform, 'The Nightingale and the Rose,' for me, works best as an education in feeling, which is one of the functions that the new genre of literature for children in the second half of the nineteenth century performed. Moralism is out, and refinement of sensibility is the game. It's a game that is perhaps undervalued in our age when the shock of the new is so highly valued. There are glimmers in this story of the wickedly funny comedian of manners, because Oscar, being Oscar, cannot forgo a soupcon of wit and railery at the absolutism of the young Romeo and his posturing. 

The other story, 'The Remarkable Rocket', is Wilde in a very different key, high comedy/farce, and one that bears much closer relationship to the plays. Although finally a moral tale, it's the journey through a field of very naughty double-entendres that will entrance and the moralism takes a back seat to the comedy. I love the story's cast of fireworks. Ask any pyrotechnist and you'll find that fireworks have their own language and personalities. I know. I had the rare pleasure of talking to one quite recently. Chatting animatedly about his passion, he adopted a tragic mien when he informed me that not even theatre companies at the biggest end of town could afford him. He should exist, but what a pity as 5 November approaches, that catherine wheels and rockets and squibs are not the commonplace experiences they used to be.

Oscar has been a very rewarding obsession for Bloomsday since 2009. We've cast him as Buck Mulligan in Wilde about Joyce, and performed Earnest in part and in full. Paul Goddard, who will be performing in Rapture in Three Keys, is Bloomsday's Oscar and he is once again relishing the challenge (by the way and being really trivial, we think he looks like Oscar would have in his wildest dreams loved to look).  Wilde is such a contrast to Joyce, but as we've argued before, Joyce owed him a huge debt and had more than a passing intellectual engagement with him, even in an early essay casting him as a persecuted Christ figure.

See you on Friday or Sunday, I hope. And if not, think of revisiting the stories. Project Gutenberg has them or you might be lucky enough to chance on a deluxe illustrated verrsion. f.