Tuesday 27 September 2011

Wilde, Oscar "A Woman of No Importance"


Wilde, Oscar "A Woman of No Importance" - 1893

Oscar Wilde has a strangely hilarious sarcastic humour, one can only admire how he handles any kind of situation in that weirdly funny way. Not my first Oscar Wilde, certainly also not my last. :-D

"A Woman of No Importance", the title itself is already so promising. We see Oscar Wilde's contemporary upper class whiling away their time. They play games, they go shooting, they dance, they gossip about other people. They have nothing to do, so they make up important issues. The characters are "as you expect them to be", their relationships the same. I have thoroughly enjoyed the sarcasm in this play.

From the back cover:
"Staged in 1893, when Wilde had already achieved fame, wealth and notoriety, A Woman of No Importance was another attempt to fuse comedy of manners with high melodrama. Gerald Arbuthnot is a young man on the make, with an American heiress and the post of secretary to the brilliant but dissolute Lord Illingworth within his reach. When he asks his mother to celebrate with them, it turns out that Illingworth is Gerald's father, who seduced and abandoned his mother twenty years earlier. Loyalty weighs heavier than ambition, and Gerald declines the association with Illingworth. This edition, which also analyses Wilde's various drafts and revisions of the play, argues that the playwright here continued to explore the rivalry between an older man and woman for the affection of a beautiful young man."

Another great play by Oscar Wilde is "The Importance of Being Earnest" and the interesting biography about his wife "Constance".

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