LIVING UP TO MY BLUE CHINA
The late Richard Ellmann, whose authoritative critical biography Oscar Wilde was the inspiration for the new play Living Up to My Blue China, rightly noted: “Among the writers identified with the 1890s, Wilde is the only one whom everyone still reads.” Wilde’s paradoxical bons mots may sound affected today, as they must have in his own time, but they don’t sound antique; from the piercingly witty one-liners he concocted for his novel and plays to the painfully heartfelt outpourings of his epic rumination on love and loss, De Profundis, Wilde speaks in a remarkably modern voice. Whether we approve of him or not–and Wilde continues to stir controversy, though I don’t think British schoolboys are whipped for reading his books anymore–we have no trouble recognizing the energy and spirit of his dazzling and defiant tone. The laws and conventions of a society may change in 100 years, but the iconoclasm that satirizes those laws and conventions always has its place–even if that place is on the edge of a precipice.
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The production is blessedly lucky to have Harry Althaus playing Oscar I. With his thick lips, pale skin, dreamy gaze, and “coy, carnal smile” (as Wilde’s friend Max Beerbohm said of Wilde’s), Althaus bears a remarkable resemblance to the man he plays; and he projects just the right persona–brave and wise and vulnerable and compassionate and smug all at once. He lacks the vocal resonance Wilde was famous for, and he’s too young to be believable as a man in his 40s; but he is convincing in a way that other far more famous and polished actors who have played Wilde (Vincent Price, Peter Finch, and Robert Morley among them) were not.
