The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde at The Guthrie

Minneapolis St. Paul Magazine ^ | 12 June 2008 | Tad Simons

[shrinkermd]

Oscar Wilde is one of most famous homosexuals in history, so it sometimes surprises people when they learn that Wilde had a wife named Constance and two children. Divorced before Wilde reached the pinnacle of his fame, Constance is one of history’s forgotten women: a spirited, intelligent person in her own right, but one doomed to live in the shadow of Wilde’s legacy, as well as endure the humiliating consequences of his homosexual passions.

Thomas Kilroy’s play, The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde, now playing on the Guthrie’s Proscenium Stage, is a moody, serious, artful exploration of the dark side of Wilde’s life, told through the unsympathetic eyes of the wife whose life he all but destroyed.

Since Wilde is also one of the most flamboyant characters in history, it’s hard to imagine how a female character could out-dramatize him, but Sarah Agnew invests Constance with so much vitality and common sense that she makes Matthew Greer’s Oscar look like a bit of a buffoon. Her tongue is much sharper than Wilde’s, and carries more sting, a contrast that makes his witticisms seem frivolous and inappropriate, like a child arguing with an adult.

For the most part, the play explores the love triangle between Constance, Oscar, and Oscar’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas...But it also dares to descend into the period of Oscar Wilde’s life no one likes to talk about—his two-year imprisonment for lewd behavior.

[shrinkermd]

What the haute bourgeois is interested in Minneapolis.

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

Later on they can always retool it as the story of Byron’s wife. There was a doormat!

[Cicero]

Shouldn’t this playwright be prosecuted for committing a hate crime by suggesting that there is something “dark” or wrong about Wilde’s homosexuality?

And this reporter should be prosecuted, too, for portraying this bigoted anti-homosexual play sympathetically. I’m surprised that anything like this should be staged in such a center for political correctness as Minneapolis.

[IronJack]

Another historical nobody whose only claim to fame was that she was married briefly to a pervert destined to also become a historical footnote.

Wilde has to be the quintessential self-loathing homosexual, flying in the face of convention until it had no other choice but to censure him, then lamenting at length about his doleful straits.

[Migraine]

The world is a better place for Wilde's having written The Happy Prince prior to going off the deep end. Much admiration for that and Dorian Gray. Troubled, but still great.

[I-ambush]

However, his life story ended on a happy note, since he repented of his homosexual acts and died a convert to the Catholic church.

[JimSEA]

Shouldn’t this playwright be prosecuted for committing a hate crime

If this was only Canada, then "the love that dares not speak its name" would be afforded due protections and Wilde would be vindicated. The playwright could go to jail along with Styne.

[Kenny Bunk]

Another historical nobody whose only claim to fame was that she was married briefly to a pervert destined to also become a historical footnote.

Last warning: never mention Mrs. McGreavey on this site again!