Oscar©

The Australian Ballet
Friday 13th September, 2024
Saturday 14th September, 2024
Regent Theatre, Melbourne

Choreography: Christopher Wheeldon
Synopsis by Christopher Wheeldon and Joby Talbot based on an original idea by Alexander Wise and Christopher Wheeldon
Composer: Joby Talbot Published by Chester Music Ltd By permission of the Wise Music Group
Stage and costume design: Jean-Marc Puissant
Lighting design: Mark Henderson
Video design: David Bergman
Assistant to the choreographer: Jacquelin Barrett
Assistant to the choreographer: Jason Fowler
Sound design: Ned Prevezer
Intimacy Coordinator: Amy Cater

Orchestra Victoria
Conductor: Jonathan Lo
Concertmaster: Yi Wang
Voice of Nightingale: Victoria Lambourn

Running Wilde, my response to The Australian Ballet’s Oscar©, drawn up especially for Fjord Review.

On opening night of the world premiere of Christopher Wheeldon’s Oscar©, at The Australian Ballet’s new home for the next three years, The Regent Theatre (as the State Theatre undergoes renovations and a name change), I am catapulted from the 13th of September, 2024 to the 26th of April, 1885, and the commencement of the trial of Oscar Wilde. “Now as the jury files back into court,” narrates Seán O’Shea, “Oscar leaned over the dock, eagerly scanning the faces of the twelve good men and true, seemingly trying to read in their physiognomies his fate; no-one spoke, no-one hardly dared to breathe.” In the thick of it, we begin, and the effect is a kaleidoscopic tornedo. In the moment before the rise becomes the fall, Oscar© teeters, and the effect is hypnotic, from start to finish.

On the 25th of May, Wilde was imprisoned and sentenced[i] to two years hard labour, the maximum sentence allowed, for crimes of “gross indecency” following his relationship with Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas. But this new work, commissioned by The Australian Ballet, and introduced by Artistic Director David Hallberg as “a story not typically seen in classical ballet”[ii], is no bio-ballet. This is no linear tale of Wilde, but rather one that rumbles and sparkles at a pace befitting Wilde’s wit and legacy, in a beautiful melding of both life and writing.

As such, colliding onto the stage for a page, Wheeldon weaves Wilde’s fairy tale, The Nightingale and the Rose, in Act I, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, in Act II, to tease out delicious Wildean questions and paradoxes, and further blur the line between where the artist ends and the art begins. We skitter between history and memory, fiction and fairy tale, the interior self and the external façade, in epigrammatic fashion. We meet Wilde as both the celebrated playwright and author, cigarette in hand, held aloft on the shoulders of two men, the literal toast of society, and, conversely, as C.3.3[iii], the prison-given identity which indicated the third cell on the third landing of C block, and under which Wilde would be known. From one of fame to one of torment, Oscar© begins at the moment Wilde’s world is severed. Wilde, inhabited so completely by Callum Linnane, balances upon the knife edge of what was and what will become, ever netting the complex emotions of the human heart, just as Wilde’s own fairy tales do. Alluding a fixed meaning and instead proposing an open ‘perhaps’, just like The Nightingale, in the spirit of Wilde’s own observation, in The Truth of Masks, that a “truth in art is that whose contradictory may also be true”[iv].

Wheeldon gives Wilde and Joseph Caley’s Robbie Ross, albeit briefly, and later, more sustainedly, Wilde and Benjamin Garrett’s “Bosie”, their After the Rain moment. It is so beautiful to finally feel, to finally see, two figures, entwined, and there being no need to translate a heteronormative tenderness to my own experience, my own world, my own way of being. And in Linnane and Garrett’s pas de deux it feels like a new beginning, or, to paraphrase Hallberg in his conversation with Wheeldon in the Dress Circle the following day, now we can change the course without apology or fear[v]. As Garrett catches, supports, and then gently twists and ushers Linnane upside down, both feet extended in the air, so the two almost mirror each other, meeting in the middle, like for like, it is a new beginning, a long time coming. Slowly pinwheeling across the stage, Linnane then rotates Garrett, and the effect is breathtaking. All the more for the known outcome, for this fairytale, like the carnations in the lapels watered with arsenic so as to turn them green, cannot last.

Elsewhere, under the spell, Ako Kondo as the Nightingale is repeatedly suspended, quivering, wings breaking, and pierced by the Rose Tree of five male figures. Some with green carnations in their buttonholes, with a back vent of blood-red in their suiting, and one with a gloved red hand, it is the fairytale that allows the reader room for interpretation. By moonlight, different narratives not immediately detectable are revealed, and the outcome is tragic. The Nightingale proposes, as Wilde wrote, “many answers”[vi], beneath the ‘all for love; all for naught’ first appearance. As Kondo’s Nightingale rolls across the folded-forward backs of the five figures as the Rose Tree, the anguish is palpable.

Highlighted by the shapes they form, whether together or apart from Wilde, from Sharni Spencer, as Constance Wilde, in the end of evening pas de trois of stolen glances and longing between Linnane and Caley, to Benedicte Bemet as Sara Bernhardt, Wilde’s “Incomparable One”; Mia Heathcote’s “with the air of bird” Lillie Langtry; Jill Ogai’s mesmerising Ellen Terry; and Adam Elmes as Oscar’s Shadow sans mask, Oscar© swings, rapidly so, between different characters, times, meanings, and locations. Bookended between the high art, highbrow of Wigmore Hall, a well-regarded recital hall in London, and a popular venue, Wilton’s Music Hall in the East End of London, as set and costume designer Jean-Marc Puissant explains[vii], locations are further unpinned and fluid, by Act II, in a telling of the whole. The contrast of states particularly apparent in the narrow footprint of the cell in which Wilde dwelled (and described in The Ballard of Reading Gaol) as a “foul and dark latrine”, where “Sleep will not lie down, but walks / Wild-eyed and cries to Time”. Joby Talbot’s gloriously unsettled score, undercuts, and Orchestra Victoria, under Conductor Jonathan Lo, fling open a doorway to a whole new world, replete with an insistent ringing to evoke Wilde’s tinnitus as a result of a fall whilst he was imprisoned.

Returning again, the following night, to see the world repositioned, did not disappoint, as once more Linnane rendered himself near unrecognisable and misshapen as the final “withered, wrinkled, and lonesome of visage”[viii], in full Gothic awareness of past selves. Expressing the inward, outwardly, I am floored by what is no longer hidden. Removing the filter, removing the mask, in more ways than one.

[i] It wasn’t until 2017 that Oscar Wilde, and an estimated 50,000 men, were pardoned by the British government for the “crime” of gross indecency. ‘UK issues posthumous pardons for thousands of gay men’, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/31/uk-issues-posthumous-pardons-thousands-gay-men-alan-turing-law, accessed 15th September, 2024

[ii] “As we present the world premiere of Oscar©, we are making history… Representation for all people is paramount to our vision of the future.” David Hallberg introduction, Oscar©, The Australian Ballet programme, Melbourne and Sydney, 2024, p. 11.

[iii] Once admitted, the prisoner lost his name and henceforth would be known only by the cell number. Wilde’s The Ballard of Reading Gaol is published under the ‘name’ C.3.3..

[iv] Review by Graham Price of Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales by Anne Markey, Irish University Review, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Autumn/Winter), 2013, p. 445,  https://www.jstor.org/stable/24576861, accessed 15th September, 2024.

[v] David Hallberg in conversation with Christopher Wheeldon, as part of ‘Hallberg In Conversation’, Dress Circle, Regent Theatre, Saturday 14th September, 2024, between the 2nd and 3rd performance of Oscar©.

[vi] “I like to fancy that there may be many meanings in the tale [The Nightingale and the Rose] for in writing it I did not start with an idea and clothe it in form, but began with a form strove to make it beautiful enough to have many secrets and many answers.” Oscar Wilde, Letters, p. 218, sighted by John-Charles Duffy in ‘Gay-Related Themes in the Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde’, Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2001, p. 329, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25058557, accessed 25th September, 2024.

[vii] ‘Designing Oscar© with Jean-Marc Puissant’, The Australian Ballet YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHMvs2Suofc, accessed 13th September, 2024.

[viii] Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, from the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 172, sighted by Alison Milbank, ‘Positive Duality in The Picture of Dorian Gray’, The Wildean, No. 44, January 2014, p. 34, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48569039, accessed 14th September, 2024.

Oscar Wilde: Callum Linnane
Constance Wilde: Sharni Spencer
Robbie Ross: Joseph Caley
Lord Alfred Douglas/Bosie: Benjamin Garrett
Lord Queensberry: Steven Heathcote AM
Oscar’s Shadow: Adam Elmes
Cyril Wilde: Bryce Latham
Vyvyan Wilde: Henry Berlin
Harri: Marcus Morelli
Zella: Cameron Holmes
Sara Bernhardt: Benedicte Bemet (Friday)/Isobelle Dashwood (Saturday)
Lillie Langtry: Mia Heathcote
Ellen Terry: Jill Ogai
Nightingale: Ako Kondo
Student: Benjamin Garrett
Professor’s Daughter: Katherine Sonnekus
Dorian Gray: Adam Elmes
Basil Hallward: Victor Estévez
Lord Henry: Jake Mangakahia
Sybil Vane: Samara Merrick
Narrator: Seán O’Shea

Oscar© opens in Sydney/Warrang on the 8th of November, 2024

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Image credit: The Australian Ballet’s Callum Linnane as Oscar Wilde in Christopher Wheeldon’s Oscar© by Christopher Rodgers-Wilson