Oscar Wilde and the Art of Creating a Great Sensation

Introduction: Oscar Wilde and the Art of Creating a Great Sensation There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray 24) The concluding sentence in “The Remarkable Rocket,” one of Oscar Wilde’s “studies in prose” included in The Happy Prince and Other Tales (Complete Letters 352), contains what could be read as a sly piece of Wildean self- parody: “ ‘I knew I should create a great sensation,’ gasped the Rocket, and he went out” (301). Yet, while the one fleeting moment of magnificence so eagerly antici- pated by Wilde’s vainglorious rocket eventually goes entirely unnoticed by the world, the verbal pyrotechnics of the Irish playwright’s works and their par- adoxical wit have never failed to captivate Viennese theatre audiences ever since emitting their initial sparks. At first promoted as sensational fin- de- siècle literary novelties, Wilde’s works became instantly embroiled in a tangled web of journalistic sensation- alism, biographical myth- making, and ideological instrumentalisation, which rendered their evaluation inseparable from the ever- growing fascination with the author’s life. This interest in Wilde’s biography is evidenced, for example, by the amount of public attention generated by a guest performance of Leslie and Sewell Stokes’s three- act biodrama Oscar Wilde (His Life and Trial), pre- sented by “Edward Stirling and The English Players” at Vienna’s Scala Theatre on 1 and 6 December 1937 (Austrian Theatre Museum, playbills Scala 1937). Consisting of ‘loosely connected scenes from the life of the unfortunate poet’1 (“lose Szenen aus dem Leben des unglücklichen Dichters”), the play illustrated, as the Neues Wiener Tagblatt critic claimed, Wilde’s appalling descent from glamorous socialite to humble prisoner and pitiful drunkard (3 December 1937, 11). This “first British dramatic version of Wilde’s career” had premièred only one year previously in a private performance at London’s Gate Theatre Studio with Robert Morley in the lead (Bristow, “Picturing” 40). In England, the play was not granted a public licence until 1961, by which time it had become 1 Here, as in the following, where no published English translations are available, translations from the German are by the author. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | DOI: 10.1163/ 9789004370463_ 002 2 Introduction the basis of Gregory Ratoff’s 1960 feature film Oscar Wilde, again starring Morley as Wilde. In this context, the highly favourable Viennese echo elicited by the English Players’ guest performance appears remarkably open- minded, even if not untypical of the early Continental European Wilde reception. Far from igniting a blazing theatrical scandal, the dramatised biography triggered a string of deeply sympathetic responses and was widely perceived as a faith- ful representation of Wilde’s personal catastrophe, devoid of euphemism and embellishment and yet steering clear of embarrassing details.2 More than eighty years later, Wilde keeps holding his ground in the local theatrical landscape, and his society comedies in particular have remained easily marketable theatrical commodities and classics of comic theatre. Their continued accessibility, whether as aesthetically innovative contempo- rary reworkings or popular summer theatre fare, may be attributed to what Michael Patrick Gillespie defines as “a form of controlled innovation, […] falling somewhere between bafflement and boredom” (Oscar Wilde 85). The plays’ inherent potential of ‘pleasing and teasing,’ which is rooted in their skilful manoeuvring between conformism and subversion, conventionality and innovation, together with their epigrammatic wit and stylistic brilliancy,3 has not only proved amenable to combining audience appeal with critical acclaim and scholarly debate; it has also lent itself to what might be labelled the ‘muted eccentricity’ of an interpretive approach that teams up a semi- conventional directorial concept with a sound (celebrity) acting performance in an attempt to maintain audience approval by steering a ‘safe’ course between the reassur- ingly familiar and the radically new. Oscar Wilde in Vienna merges chronological perspective, thematic focus, and theoretical background. In doing so, it considers the reception of Wilde’s dramatic works on twentieth- century Viennese stages from an interdisciplin- ary angle. It strives to broaden the linear approach of conventional reception history by incorporating tools and methods from cultural transfer theory, literary sociology, network analysis, and theatre studies and thus owns up to the dynamic interplay of literary artefact, medium, and recipients so shrewdly diagnosed by Wilde himself in an 1895 interview: “ ‘When a play that is a work of art is produced on the stage what is being tested is not the play, but the stage; 2 See, for example, the critical commentary in Wiener Zeitung, which credits the authors of Oscar Wilde with a unique aptitude for circumventing the more risqué portions of their pro- foundly controversial subject matter, venturing into more perilous territory only in the play’s court trial scenes (3 December 1937, 9). 3 According to Jarlath Killeen, “it would not be too much of an exaggeration to argue that Wilde’s career was based on his mastery of the epigram, maxim and aphorism” (4)..

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