Title card of the 19 November 2024 stream of Oscar©.

On 19 November 2024 the Australian National Ballet live-streamed its production of Christopher Wheeldon's Oscar©. Of course, I tuned in.

As the Water-Rat in Wilde’s story ‘The Devoted Friend’ observes, ‘Every good story-teller nowadays starts with the end, and then goes on to the beginning, and concludes with the middle. That is the new method.’ It is also the method of Oscar©, which begins with Wilde’s conviction before skipping back several years to the mid-1880s.

Like the biopics Wilde (1997) and The Happy Prince (2018), Oscar© emphasises the links between Wilde’s life and art. In the first act the story of Wilde’s rise is told alongside that of his fairy tale ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’. In the second act Wilde ruminates on his past life and on his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray as he languishes in Reading Prison.

Callum Linnane as Oscar and Sharni Spencer as Constance.

Wilde’s witticisms, as represented by dance moves, are copied by other socialites.

The trial of Oscar Wilde.

I am no expert when it comes to dance, but I was particularly impressed with the pas de deux between Oscar and Constance. A beaming and seemingly weightless Sharni Spencer floated across the stage aided by Callum Linnane, reminding me of Constance’s heartbreaking letter to her brother: ‘I am engaged to Oscar Wilde and perfectly and insanely happy’.

I also liked how Wilde’s hypnotic conversation was represented as movements – a trip of the toe, a turn of the wrist – that are enthusiastically taken up by his audience. But representing the slow passage of time in prison by having Wilde lie on his bed and move his legs as though they were the hands of a clock struck me as rather simplistic, and not in consonance with Wilde’s dictum that ‘The object of art is not simple truth but complex beauty’.

The story adheres quite faithfully to facts, but here it is Robert Ross rather than Bosie Douglas who introduces Wilde to London’s sexual underworld.

Less forgiveable is the attempt to draw a parallel between the awful acting of Sibyl Vane in Dorian Gray and performances by Wilde’s idols Ellen Terry, Sarah Bernhardt, and Lillie Langtry. Mia Heathcote as Langtry poses like a melodramatic tragedy queen; Jill Ogai as Terry convulses spasmodically in an over-the-top interpretation of Ophelia; and Benedicte Bemet as The Divine Sarah topples off a chaise longue because she is so absorbed in her own image in a mirror. To my mind, this is dishonest: Terry was the greatest actress of the English stage in the late nineteenth century; Bernhardt, the greatest actress of the French stage during the same period. To celebrate one talented man, it is not necessary to mock three talented women. Wilde would not thank Wheeldon for doing so.

That apart, I enjoyed Oscar© and hope it transfers to London at some point in the near future.