Taking Wilde to his heart
A GIANT of modern British theatre, playwright David Hare visits Dublin next week with a revival of his 1998 play The Judas Kiss, which centres on two pivotal moments in the life of Oscar Wilde. Rupert Everett plays the famous Irish writer, and his performance earned critical plaudits when the production ran in London’s Hampstead Theatre recently.
Hare, too, is full of praise for Everett. “There’s something extraordinary about a man who is himself very, very witty and literate, as Rupert is, merging with Oscar Wilde,” he says. “If you talk to Rupert he’s as sharp as a knife. It’s a rare example of an actor being able to play an intellectual and totally convince you that they’re that person.”
Hare — who, in addition to his theatre work, is renowned for his screenwriting credits on films such as The Hours and The Reader — has long been fascinated with Wilde. As a student in Cambridge in the 1960s, he wanted to write his dissertation on Wilde, but this suggestion was met with consternation by his supervisors. “I was told that Wilde was not serious and that he was not somebody who could be studied by the English department,” says Hare. “Wilde did not belong, they said, to the moral tradition.”
Hare took a contrary view and he still does. “I have always seen Wilde as an Irish socialist and a great deal more profound in his thought than he is generally given credit for, at least on this side of the sea,” he says. “In England he is popularly misunderstood as somebody who went around making aphorisms and not taking life terribly seriously, whereas I’ve always thought there is a profound ethic at the heart of Wilde.”
In The Judas Kiss, Hare explores two remarkable ethical choices the playwright made. The first was his decision to stay in London and stand trial for ‘gross indecency’ when he might well have fled abroad to safety. The second was opting to return to former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, upon serving his sentence in Reading Gaol, despite the fact that it was he who had precipitated Wilde’s downfall.
“Both decisions are, on the surface, incomprehensible,” says Hare. “In a way you could say they are decisions no-one could ever understand. The deeper I went into trying to understand them, the more fascinating Wilde became to me.”
The play’s title makes an obvious allusion to the Christ story, and Wilde himself famously nursed an obsession with Catholicism.
“If I may say this, as a non-believer, I think he had a slightly unhealthy obsession with the Christ story,” says Hare. “Obviously, you always fear for someone who starts identifying with Christ because traditionally it’s considered a sign of insanity, isn’t it? But it’s true that in Reading Gaol he read the Christ story over and over again and he saw himself through it. And there are certain things that Wilde did have in common with Christ. The one I try and bring out in the play is this boundless generosity toward people. Wilde, genuinely, could never pass a beggar without giving him money. And he had no eye for class or status or social division.”
Wilde had an “ethic of love”, says Hare. “It’s a very dangerous philosophy and Wilde drove it as far as it could be driven,” he says. “He had a philosophy that meant you were responsible for your own behaviour and not other people’s. For him morality doesn’t consist in telling other people what to do but consists in what you do yourself.
“His basic quarrel with Victorian society was that it was moralistic, not moral,” Hare continues. “Every Victorian delighted in telling other people — particularly the poor — how they should behave. But Victorian society wasn’t so good at regulating its own behaviour. I feel that in the 14 years since this play was written, this message has become much more timely. What has been going on in the last ten years is the British and the Americans invading countries and telling them how they should order themselves. Wilde would say of Iraq or Afghanistan that yes, it’s very easy to go into countries and reorganise them according to your own wishes, but shouldn’t morality actually consist of not imposing your own standards on other people but examining those standards of your own?”
Hare’s own work has frequently examined the conscience of Western society — particularly that of his homeland. He has reckoned with the war in Iraq and the crisis in Israel and Palestine. Closer to home he has peered into the inner workings of such institutions as the British media, the legal system, the Church of England, party politics, and the secret services.
“Curiosity drives me,” he says. “The privilege of being a playwright for me is voyeurism. I enjoy going into people’s lives and spending time with people who think and feel differently to me. And it’s that which renews me all the time, rather than sitting alone in my wretched study contemplating my own inadequacies.”
Hare’s 1993 play The Absence of War saw him researching the Labour party but he had no inkling then of the fate set to befall New Labour just a few years later as it lurched to the right.
“I think anyone that claims to have seen what you might call the ‘messianic streak’ in Tony Blair is lying, actually,” says Hare. “When Tony Blair came to power what was most often said about him was that he was obsessed with popularity, that he only did what focus groups told him to do, and that he was driven by caution and lack of conviction. That was the popular view of Tony Blair. When he turned into a crusader for American adventurism you could have knocked us all down with a feather. Nobody saw that coming. And the certain pleasure he then began to take in being unpopular seemed to me yet another unhealthy example of identification with the Christ story.”
Hare delivers the last line with a perfect Wildean drollness. Though he is drawn to sensitive subject matter, Hare has always counted a wry sense of humour in his armoury. It was much in display in Page Eight, his hugely successful drama for BBC television last year. A spy thriller starring Bill Nighy, Rachel Weisz, Michael Gambon and Ralph Fiennes, the film dealt intelligently with very dark subject matter — state collusion in secret torture practices — yet it managed to be charmingly off-beat and stylish as well. Hare is currently working on two sequels.
“Much to everyone’s astonishment it got this amazing audience, so suddenly I’m a popular writer,” he says. “One of the cast sent me an email in which she said ‘how did you manage to make a film that’s so effortlessly chic?’. I’ve been waiting for somebody to say that my whole life. It’s more or less the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
* The Judas Kiss is at the Gaiety, Oct 15-20
