Oscar Wilde: The Complete Interviews, which will be published in March 2022, will include not just interviews with Wilde, but a selection of interviews given by others about Wilde.
I have decided only to include interviews about Wilde himself, excluding interviews that are about Wilde’s works. This rule has meant that some interviews that are nevertheless interesting and worth reading have not made the cut. The interview below is an example.
In 1893 Herbert Beerbohm Tree commissioned Wilde to write a play for the Haymarket Theatre. That play was A Woman of No Importance, Wilde’s second society comedy. Beerbohm Tree created the role of the dandyish cad, Lord Illingworth, while the heroine, Mrs Arbuthnot, was played by Wilde’s friend Mrs Bernard Beere. The production ran for 113 performances. By the standards of the day, it was a hit.
In 1907, seven years after the author’s death, Tree decided to revive the play for His Majesty’s Theatre, casting Marion Terry as Mrs Arbuthnot. Terry had previously created the role of Mrs Erlynne in Lady Windermere’s Fan.
In this joint interview for The Daily Chronicle, given a week before the revival opened, Tree and Terry discuss whether A Woman of No Importance has dated since it was first staged. That may seem a bizarre idea today when, more than a century later, the play is still dazzling audiences. But Tree and Terry’s conversation gives us a perspective on how two leading actors of the era felt that theatre had changed in the space of a few years.
“An ‘Ageless’ Play,” The Daily Chronicle (London, UK), 18 May 1907
Talk with Mr. Tree and Miss Marion Terry.
At His Majesty’s Theatre next Wednesday Mr. Tree will revive that brilliant play, “A Woman of No Importance.”
Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, 1900s, by Elliott & Fry. Image: NPG, London.
In an interview yesterday the famous actor–manager vigorously combated a suggestion that the present-day theatregoer might possibly consider the play somewhat old fashioned.
“Emphatically not,” he exclaimed, “emphatically not. Personally I am strongly of the opinion that this play shows its age less than any play of which I know. It seems to me to have been written before its time, so much so indeed that the world has only just now grown up to it. I consider it more modern, more in touch with the actual spirit of the age than it was when I first produced it in 1893. Why even the suffrage question is touched on.
“Only, of course, the play that is very true can avoid becoming old fashioned—like the Venus of Milo, who is for all time in her nudity, but who, did she don a crinoline, would at once become demodée. The happenings of ten or fifteen years ago are often not so recent, not so ‘modern,’ or so in touch with us of today as ‘Caesar’ or ‘Cleopatra.’ A play of ten years ago will be tremendously old fashioned unless it is written with great truth—which I maintain is the case with the ‘Woman of No Importance.’
Marion Terry, 1904, by Mrs Albert Broom. Image: NPG, London.
“Ah! good morning, Miss Terry,” broke off Mr. Tree, as Miss Marion Terry, that delightful exponent of the “Woman of No Importance,” herself walked upon the stage of His Majesty’s, where the actor–manager was going through his morning budget of letters. “Here we are busily wondering how far the ‘Woman of No Importance’ is in touch with the present day.”
“Well, in some respects,” replied the lady, “I must confess I think she will appear a little old-fashioned, which would be deplorable in a play which is so brilliant, so witty, so human.”
“Exactly,” chimed in Mr. Tree, “but do you not see you contradict your own arguments when you speak of its humanity? It is that which saves it from ever being out of date.”
“Yes,” agreed Miss Terry, “but the speeches are longer than an audience today is accustomed to.”
“Yes, but they are too brilliant to bore.”
“Its pathos is almost too painful at times for utterance,” observed Miss Terry.
“Yes,” murmured Mr. Tree, “the lines that you have to say yourself, ‘leave me in a little walled-in garden and a well of water and the child that God sent me’—those are lines that emphasise the eternal humanity of this play and that rank it indeed with the finest writing of all time.”
As to the audience of today, Miss Terry was of opinion that they were intellectually an improvement on those who flocked in such crowds to see the “Woman of No Importance” in the early Nineties.
Mr. Tree rather differed from her. “I think they are just the same as they were then,” he said, “just as I think the smart people represented in Wilde’s play are exactly the same today. But there, of course, I may be wrong. One never knows when one ceases to be in touch with the spirit of the moment. Still I have a sort of consciousness, a sort of hope that I retain the growing mind, the mind that keeps pace with the day, which is the one test of modernity—the mind which can see in a great play of this class the quality which Tennyson so admirably attributed to King Arthur’s Round Table, that it is a mirror of the mighty world. In Wilde’s play we see each other, not dimly as in a Roman mirror, but absolutely face to face.”