It's funny how all the qualities that made Brett a perfect Sherlock Holmes also made him perfect for a Wildean protagonist. That deep, eloquent voice and those hawkish features. I heard Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde got along very well, actually.
An Ideal Husband is a good play and certainly relevant to our increasingly puritanical times--Wilde was lampooning Victorian virtues so it says something that his witticisms feel fresher and more dangerous than they did when I first read him thirty or so years ago. But there's a lot of just plain good insight, too. Like Mrs. Cheveley's line about how "women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are." Ah! That's so fucking true. I've also been reading The Picture of Dorian Gray lately and this description of a minor character just killed me:
She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. She was always in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions.
God, it's so good, it's deadly.
Last night I noticed The Shakespeare Network had my favourite film of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, the 1968 one with Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, Diana Rigg, Ian Holm, and David Warner with cinematography from Peter Suschitzky (Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Empire Strikes Back, several David Cronenberg movies). It's a good time to watch it. The heat here's about to make me see fairies anyway.
2 comments:
love your blog. fortuitously stumbled across it while researching past kidnapping hoaxes and am now obsessed with all your filmic and cultural discoveries. Have you ever thought of turning it from a blogspot into a substack?
Thanks, yeah, I've been meaning to look at Substack.
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