Cast

Synopsis

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Directors Notes

To appreciate Wilde it is necessary to take him at a gallop as it were. Get in the saddle, give him his head, and enjoy the speed and sparkle of his wit. If you, at the same time, perceive the deeper note behind his epigrams, so much the better !

Wilde is such a flatterer. He assumes that his audience will automatically recognize not only his characters, but also his situations in which he places them. He scatters his “upper class” allusions like confetti, taking it for granted that we will get the point. Fair enough–how many of us have walked the battlements at Elsinore or stood on the Rialto?

Beneath the surface glitter, however, there is a real and bitter awareness of the cruelty of the world’s frustrating power. Wilde knows that sooner or later hypocrisy usually gets its ‘come-uppance’, and if there is more than a suggestion of clay about the feet of most of his people, well, a better man than he had already noticed that.

But never mind all that: sit back and enjoy yourselves. There is innocence here as well as duplicity, and Heaven knows there is little enough of that around these days.