Oscar Wilde was a snob who charmed his way into English high society. He was also a penetrating critic of snobbery, a socialist and a closeted gay man.
That doubleness lies at the heart of An Ideal Husband, his last drawingroom comedy and most political work, whose first production coincided with the playwright’s ill-fated libel action and arrest for “gross indecency” in 1895.
Marc Atkinson Borrull’s assured revival at the Gate Theatre both captures the mordant spirit of Wilde’s satire of Victorian hypocrisy and subtly evokes the ways in which the play anticipates its author’s downfall.
The action opens in a sumptuous London mansion, where the Liberal politician Sir Robert Chiltern and his wife are hosting a party. In a twist on Wilde’s stage directions, Kat Heath’s set features a sofa upholstered with scenes from the painter François Boucher’s erotically charged rococo fantasy The Triumph of Venus.
It’s an apt symbol for a society struggling to conceal diverse forms of desire within a strict moral order.
