Review: The Importance of Being Oscar, Park Theatre ★★★★

Alastair Whatley brings Oscar Wilde’s own words to life in a solo biography with real bite

Oscar Wilde arrived in New York in 1882 and told customs officials he had nothing to declare except his genius. It’s a good line to keep in your pocket walking into Park200, because The Importance of Being Oscar spends ninety minutes proving how many more of them he had.

This is a solo show, performed by Alastair Whatley and built almost entirely from Wilde’s own words, alongside those spoken about him, most tellingly the transcripts from his own trial. The play itself has a curious history worth a sentence or two of background: it was written and performed by Micheál Mac Liammóir, a flamboyant Irish theatrical figure who toured it some 600 times between 1960 and 1976, and who was, as it happens, not Irish at all but an Englishman named Alfred Willmore who invented the persona wholesale. Director Michael Fentiman‘s programme note describes feeling as though he were “dancing with ghosts” in putting the piece together, and there’s something apt in that: Whatley is performing Wilde through Mac Liammóir’s script, in a run marking the first London revival of the play in over twenty-five years.

Structurally, it moves between narration, poetry and lifted passages of the actual plays, and the transitions between registers are handled smoothly. This is biography rather than drama in the conventional sense, told chronologically. It introduces you to a wider picture of the man than you might already carry around. I’d never, for instance, properly registered the significance of the green carnation Wilde is so often pictured wearing: a flower with no natural green variety, dyed for the purpose, worn by him and his circle in the 1890s as a discreet, deniable signal of who they were to one another. The production doesn’t dwell on it, but the groundwork it lays makes you want to go and look such things up afterwards.

Where the piece does properly tighten is in the trial, which sits in the second half alongside De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Here the design earns its keep: a harsh, narrow spotlight isolates Whatley in the dock, and the sound design leans in underneath to sharpen the sense of something closing in. It’s the one stretch where the story feels like it’s tightening around its subject rather than simply presenting him, and the play uses Wilde’s own courtroom defence of “the love that dare not speak its name” verbatim:

“The Love that dare not speak its name in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare.“

By all accounts it moved the jury to the point of deadlock. It didn’t save him. Hearing it delivered in a North London theatre, well over a century on, it still lands as a beautifully-written piece of rhetoric that exposes just how much Wilde needed his “open secret” to stay secret, and Whatley gives it the space it needs rather than rushing past it.

The rest of the second half is darker still with De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol taking over. De Profundis is the more exposing of the two, all vulnerability and hurt with a longing spiritual undertow, and Whatley finds all of that without overplaying it. The Ballad of Reading Gaol is more strident, its famous stanza still doing exactly what it did in 1898:

“Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!“

It isn’t really about one man any more at that point. It’s about what any of us do to the people we love, and the audience around me was completely still for it.

Whatley’s own approach to the role is interesting: he acknowledges Mac Liammóir’s original performance without feeling bound by it, which gives the evening room to breathe rather than turning into an impression of an impression. His characterisation carries the piece; it’s always clear who is speaking, whether Wilde, Lady Bracknell or a hostile prosecutor, and that clarity matters when one actor is doing all the work. Unsurprisingly, the Lady Bracknell “handbag” moment got the biggest response of the night, though the show is wise enough not to lean on it for longer than it deserves.

The house on my visit was warm and properly attentive, laughing readily where the script allowed it and going quiet for the long passages of poetry rather than restless. That’s not nothing over ninety minutes of mostly one man talking.

It’s worth saying a word on why this still matters now. Wilde has become so absorbed into popular culture, endlessly quotable, endlessly referenced (Dorian Gray’s portrait as the ultimate anti-ageing joke, Lady Bracknell’s handbag as pure sitcom), that it’s easy to lose sight of how dangerous his life actually was.

Sarah Snook recently won an Olivier for her performance of Dorian Gray, staged and celebrated without a flicker of the controversy that greeted the novel in 1890, the only debate around it being about its use of technology on stage. That contrast is the point: a story once scandalous enough to be used as evidence against its author can now win awards with nobody blinking. Though we should remember that Wilde was only pardoned in 2017, a scant seven years before Snook’s run opened .

Wilde wrote his own best lines a century ago. This highly accomplished solo show has the good sense to let them show their bite and remind us why they matter. People who love words will delight in hearing them.

The Importance of Being Oscar runs at Park Theatre until 22 August 2026.

Read the Red Bus Londinium interview with Alastair Whatley here.

[Thank you to Alison Duiguid PR for gifted tickets for an honest review]

Photo credit: Marc Brenner

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