Vincent Price superb in Wilde role

Press, 25 August 1980, Page 4

Vincent Price superb in Wilde role

By Howard McNaughton “Diversions and Delights,” by John Gay. Vincent ' Price’s performance directed by Joseph Hardy for Michael Edgley and . Kevin Jacobsen. James Hay * Theatre, August 23.

“Give me the luxuries of life and and 1 can dispense with the necessities. The evening is over. Good night.” As abruptly as he had appeared, Vincent Price was off the stage again while his audience was still taking in the last aphorism; he returned, for curtain calls and a standing ovation, but he remained sufficiently in the role of Wilde to insist on leaving his audience thus tantalised. There are so many things that a great performer could do with Wilde that Saturday’s large audience must have had very mixed expectations, but in his first quarter-hour Mr Price quite brilliantly consolidated his audience’s response. Technically, the whole thing

was superb, but its conception might also serve as a blueprint for the ideal oneman show.

Although narcissism was at the very core of his subject, Mr Price never descended into the egotism that is the ruin of so . many one-man shows. Indeed, even though no attempt was made to duplicate Wilde’s appearance, there was even less evidence of Vincent Price in the theatre — only very occasionally did the ghost of an ironic expression hint that the actor was not entirely subsumed by the character. The situation is also very clever, one of those catch-all theatrical situations like that of Weiss’s “Marat/Sade:” Price presents the older Wilde addressing a Paris audience in 1899, talking about himself and his ideas, and implicity engaging in dialogue with ;his younger self. He scoffs at critics: “I have been told that all drama critics may be bought; well, judging from, their appearance, they can’t

be very expensive.” Yet his own appearance is a sad echo of his prime.

Wilde, of course, has become a critic himself, of himself. He had once made a character say, “It is to criticism that the future belongs. The subject-matter at the disposal of creation becomes every day more limited in extent and variety.” In 1899 his subject-matter has expired, and Gay’s Wilde resorts to lecturing to pay for his absinthe; his topic seems the criticism of everything he has been.

The writings do survive, in memory as well as (furtively) in print. A recitation of ‘‘The Harlot’s House” in particular makes us feel we are glimpsing the younger Wilde. But the effort (unsuccessful) to forget the more recent past seems dominant and one of the most emotional moments of the evening comes when Wilde, having earned his second glass, figuratively throws away “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”.