Shilling For Oscar Wilde

Back when colonialism was mainstream, English writers, possessed by a terminal bloating of manifest destiny, spat out novels the way modern governments spat out fossil fuel subsidies. Verbal diarrhea was liquid gold, ten-page monologues were celebrated as the zenith of intellect, and every character in every novelization was pulling a ‘Hello Fellow Kids’’ by making fun of the wealthy while being wealthy themselves.

The end of the 19^th century saw the popping-off of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Bran Stoker, etc., whose most successful works inevitably contained (presumed) supernatural nonsense. Paint a dog and boom, Hound of Baskerville; paint a portrait and boom, Dorian Grey; paint a nighttime sexual predator and boom, Dracula. It was a coal-burning Africa-divvying Marvel Cinematic Universe. Shame that Tom Cruise was not available to play the Mummy, or they could have built the Dark Universe when the alien dude from Scientology was still chilling in the volcano (I think?).

The smarmy smartassery of the writing from this period betrays an innocent complacency: the biggest problem facing their worlds were corrupt politicians, the out-of-touch upper class, unrequited love, unrequited ambition…a sort of everyday villainy that was blasted to insignificance by the onset of World War I.

Had Oscar Wilde survived until 1912, his career would not have survived. His Elon Musk-esque flair of pretending to meme on the absurdities of rich people while being absurdly rich himself persisted until the very last years of his life. Before his impromptu trip to prison (accused of the very thing he made fun of in his writing), his stories portrayed the rich the way Joaquin Phoenix portrayed the Joker – with satirical ambiguity. The subtleties were such that the shallow-thinking mouth-breathers of 1901 can hardly tell whether Dorian Gray or Lord Illingworth were supposed to be admired or despised.

Everything changed when Wilde went to prison. His career in England was ruined along with his finances. From that point onward, his work, understandably, became concerned with feeling sorry for himself and lamenting the suffering of the oppressed. Lengthy prostrations about moral righteousness vanished from his work, replaced by an unconditional, raw expose about, well, human cruelty.

His transformation from smartass to bleeding-heart was not shared by his contemporaries. Sherlock Holmes had to retire because World War I. His brand of English-gentlemanly crime-solving was rendered obsolete in the trenches, where as Wilde’s career may have struggled, had he lived.

Dunno what happened to Bran Stoker, but judging by my bookshelf, he was a one-hit wonder. Guess he didn’t know about sequels and licensed merchandising.

Anyway, this is actually a shilling blog. If you live in a town called Adelaide, come see Oscar Wilde’s A Woman Of No Importance here: www.trybooking.com/BUTQT. Otherwise, as always, keep peddling your MLMs and go fuck yourself.

Transparency, by Suzie Miller

I love modern plays for their confrontational brevity. They slap you hard in your face for ninety minutes, then leave you with a bad taste in your psyche.

I, as a totally functional human being, can only take so many slaps in a day before declaring ‘fuck all of this and fuck all of you’, then retreating to my blanket cave to watch That’s 70s Show on Netflix. If you have had a particularly tough day, don’t partake in Suzie Miller’s Transparency.

On the other hand, if you are ever in a state of, ‘hey, life’s pretty good, I’m up for something that can break my bubble’, then this is the play for you.

I will admit that I despise true crime thrillers, and Transparency is simultaneously the best and the worst of its kind.

It features a dude traumatized by his own past…uh…crime, so much so that you wonder how he had managed to live for so long without anyone asking him why he was acting out all the time.

It features an actual psychopath who is trying her best to live a normal life, with the caveat that, even though she constantly acts and speaks as if she is a psychopath, everyone around her thinks she is just quirky and has a dry sense of humour.

And of course, all the adults are in relationships and also cheat on each other.

I was going to make the point that all this drama was all hammed up for the purposes of the play, that the characters’ psychological backlog had to be externalized and verbalised for the sake of the audience; that life isn’t a rollercoaster packed with hidden triggers for people’s trauma; and that just because two emotionally vulnerable people spend a lot of time together, it doesn’t mean they have to fuck.

But…

Suzie Miller has the ability to distil the essence of ‘why people do this in this situation’ in less words than a song written by Cardi B , and then convey it with such rapid-fire intensity that you are slapped so hard you are spun around without ever realizing that, wait a minute, this is some melodramatic overly-serious self-aggrandizing bullshit.

The playwright’s distillation of psychological motivations is so clean, that even though the play is one tropey farce, your suspension of disbelief is never broken. Of course the dude flips out at being asked to put on a Santa costume; of course the psychopath is the most sensible person in the room; of course these adults with spouses all want to fuck others’ spouses; and of course the psychologist is, in fact, completely nuts.

Reading the play sort of feels like you are duped into enjoying a cheap trick, except that while the trick is cheap, the performance is anything but. Any Suzie Miller play will be a formidable test to an actor’s skill; they are fast, they are tight, and the difference between the audience saying ‘wait, this is hot garbage’ and ‘whoa, this is so engrossing’ is one mistimed quip.

Now, with the bar set so incredibly high and impossibly low at the same time, I will do my plug and tell you that, from 8^th to 10^th of July, you catch Suzie Miller’s The Mathematics of Longing in the Little Theatre in a little town called Adelaide. You can buy tickets here: https://www.trybooking.com/BSLCH

To those who don’t live in Adelaide, as always: go fuck yourself; and after you have fucked yourself, you might want to pick up a Suzie Miller play from your local library and give it a read. It will take 30 minutes tops, and it will be the slap in the face you will need to get on with your day.