Oscar on Oscar

By T.E.Kalem

DIVERSIONS & DELIGHTS By John Gay

Oscar Wilde played Oscar Wilde all his life. From his glittering triumphs to the depths of disgrace and adversity, he relished the role above that of any of the characters he created in fiction or for the stage. By the accounts of people who met him, Oscar Wilde's Oscar Wilde was incomparable, and no one else could ever hope to equal his performance.

Granted that initial handicap, Vincent Price as a second-best Wilde is witty, debonairly outrageous and occasionally moving. The format of his one-man show is somewhat constricting and deliberately artificial. John Gay, who devised the evening, has conceived it as a lecture delivered in Paris in 1899, a year before Wilde's death, and some time after he had been released from his two-year prison term in Reading Gaol.

The first act is rather like a remembrance of epigrams past. If one has not heard them before, and even if one has, they will be perceived for precisely what they are--diamonds. The second act is like watching a man rattling a tin cup, not for small change, but for large tears. Price manages the shift without bathos.

Wilde ultimately resists capture on the stage because his essence is his quicksilver mentality. The equations that produced his comic paradoxes are different from, but no less elusive than the equations that sprang from the mind of Einstein. One irony that might have amused Wilde is that for less than the price of two tickets at Broadway's Eugene O'Neill Theater, one can purchase all of his works in paperback, and enjoy them for a thousand and one nights.

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