An Ideal Husband

Pictured to the left is what my puppy did to Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband.

.... Which is what I've wanted to do to it more than a few times over the past few weeks. This is the first play I've been late on, the first play I've had to put aside and start over again, the first play I've dreaded in this project. This is the first time that reading felt like a chore, like homework.

It's not an awful play by any means ... I've certainly read worse. Part of my reaction was simple fatigue, as Macbeth caught up with me and work went through a rough patch.

But much of what I was feeling was simply that the play is so bloody Wilde.

This is a fascinating experiment, a melding of the Shaw/Ibsen/Strindberg well-made play with the frippery that will come to define Wilde when he writes The Importance Of Being Earnest a few years later. It's an uneasy balance, but at times reaches a fascinating depth where the "triviality" of society is stripped away to the ugly core that lies just under the surface. The stumbling block for me was getting to the seedy underbelly, as the play is frontloaded by a party scene full of bon mots and witticisms daintily pronounces by a multitude of people whom we don't care about and will never see again.

I'll be thinking about this play a bit more, and my foot-dragging reaction to it does not mean it didn't end up captivating me. It's a strange, strange play ... but that strangeness is exactly what pulls me in.