It rehearses many of Wilde’s speculations about beauty, love and art in a world hostile to all of them, whether because of the proclaimed rationality of a materialistic age or religious morality. It’s a parable about a nightingale who overhears a student lamenting his lack of a red rose with which to woo his beloved and sacrifices everything to create it for him. In many ways, most notably in its performances, this adaptation of The Nightingale and the Rose gets it right. Wilde’s “art for art’s sake”, his valorisation of sensual texture, his cutting against emotional extravagance with razor wit, his connoisseurship of vulgarity, are all defining attributes of a certain influential kind of queer aesthetic. (Sadly, I didn’t see their production of The Happy Prince.) Apparently they’re queering up Oscar, although it’s difficult to imagine, as one of the major avatars of camp, that he needs it.
The Nightingale and the Rose at Theatre Works is the second in a projected trilogy of Wilde adaptations by Little Ones Theatre. The Nightingale and the Rose, a short, elegant fable about the price of art and love (for Wilde, these were often synonyms) is a case in point. His short story collections, The Happy Prince and Other Stories and The House of Pomegranates, demonstrate his poise: he reins in an extravagance of metaphor and feeling with a dark wit and a dose of bitter realism. (The exception, of course, is The Ballad of Reading Gaol, with its notably starker diction.)Įven in his prose Wilde’s is a dangerous poetry, seductively theatrical in its rhythms, unafraid of risking the edge of self-parody. Add the intricate prosody Wilde favoured in his poems and you’re in danger of suffocating to death. They glow deeply in his plays and prose: I suspect because the plainer rhythms prevent his diction, always trembling along the verge of arch, from tipping over into jingly kitsch. Oscar Wilde is one of those writers whose poetic gifts seldom shone to advantage in his poetry. 2.5K Alison Croggon reviews Little Ones Theatre’s The Nightingale and the Rose
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