![]() ![]() Some of the problems that plagued the initial run are still present. Photograph: Richard Termine/Photo by Richard Termine ![]() ![]() ![]() The Judas Kiss explores Wilde’s penchant for Christian self-sacrifice. His is an absorbing portrayal, compelling in its immobility. In the second act, it comes to look like a death’s head, with dark eyes shining out of the otherwise stolid features. Here, his lithe figure has been bloated into stoutness, his handsome face powdered and swollen until it resembles a pale side of beef. But now the play has returned with Rupert Everett in the lead role and a somewhat less literal-minded production from the Australian director Neil Armfield.Įverett is of course the chief attraction, both because of his obvious sympathy for Wilde and the physical transformation he has enacted to play him. The play faltered in its first New York outing, a feat of miscasting (with the imposing Liam Neeson as the famed aesthete) and its appearance alongside two somewhat more experimental approaches to the material, Tom Stoppard’s melancholy and fanciful The Invention of Love and Moisés Kaufman’s documentary drama Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. A play set in two acts, the first occurs in a London hotel room after the first of three trials that would lead to Wilde’s imprisonment on charges of “gross indecency” and the second following his release from two years of hard labor and his reunion with his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas or Bosie, in a village near Naples. That’s the concern of David Hare’s 1998 play, The Judas Kiss, now revived at the Brooklyn Academy of Music after stops in London and Toronto. But his fairy tales and novel suggest a darker finish, in which beauty and pleasure yield to fates far crueler. I n Oscar Wilde’s final years, did life imitate art? Several plays might have predicted a jollier, tidier end to the man’s life. ![]()
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