"OSCAR WILDE"

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 114, 18 May 1925, Page 5

"OSCAR WILDE"

SUCCESSFUL GERMAN PLAY

ENGLISH CHARACTERS FEATURED

(FROlt OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.)

LONDON, 7th April. "Oscar Wilde," in the Dents'ches Theater at Berlin, is said to be a very big dramatic event.

At the present moment in Germany (writes the correspondent of the "Observer"), when pathological experts are the literary advisers to film companies, and authors of repute are paid by newspaper editors to attend trials in the criminal Courts, and write them up from the psychological instead of the legal standpoint, it is clear that Wilde's reputation has gained rather than lost with the fading brilliancy of his-plays. Carl Sternheim, writer of the most caustic comedies ever seen on the German stage, scourge of' middle-class society, hater of. the bourgeqisie, expert in dramatic technique and swift dialogue, has begged the question here, and seen fit to present a mere character-study of a man he loves in a series of scenas typical of his career rather than to contrast him with those typical of the spirit of his tunes. -

Oscar Wilde : His Drama," is the full title of the play, and Wilde fills the centre of the stage all the time. I'irst, in his drawing-room, a queer drawing-room of the 'nineties, as imagined by Herr Sternheim, who is his own producer, filled with queer young men in queerer waistcoats; then in the underworld drinking and expounding the beauties of Greek culture to a mob. of oddly appreciative jockeys. There is a dramatic arrest, a terribly effective trial scene, and a last act, more effective still showing the tragic death in France. CLEVER ACTING. In this series of scenes from life, viewed from the angle oE a sympathetic historian, the playwright is 'immensolv indebted to his chief actor, Herr Rudoff i'orster, for one of the best pieces of work put into a new play for a Ion" time. His Wilde is like tho later portraits, coarsened and bloated. The book of Mr. Frank Harris has been drawn upon for the chief characterisations • the best-known of the stage figures are as the readers of memoirs might expect them to be—Lord Alfred Douglas, youne and blonde; Robert Ross, a figure of real charm, cultured, and lovable; the Marquis of Queensberry, Lord Tubby who says little, but looks the more. The truth has been altered to serve the playwright's purpose where it is less pleasant than fiction. In the death-bed scene tuberculosis makes as aesthetically beautiful an ending as in the case of the Lady of the Camellias, on the same spot only a few nights before. Three impressions remain—the figure ot .Sir Hugh Dundee, emerging out of the twilit region, where dramatists and pathologist* alike have paused till now; the struggles of German actors to portray decadent gentlemen and aristocratic ghosts in the correct stylo of low-voicsd boredom, and succeeding horribly well; and the conviction that what Sternheim lias written is only a post-revolutionary father-aml-son drama after all, quite typical, with .Qupensbem- on the model of tho terrible father. Fnedricli WilItrlm, nnd his sen. another troublesome ■'lid probienjiiUe l/riU.. ;. I