Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde Essay

Oscar Wilde and his trials, both typographical error and figurative, has been the subject of quite a few films and plays ap cheat from the considerable muss of writing that exist on this subject. This is because Oscar Wilde, as a metaphorical construe has never failed to capture the public imagination as the veritable rotatory against societys delimiting and deterministic conventions and a crippling value system.And yet, Moises Kauffmans latest play Gross Indecency The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde manages to turn the relatively familiar material the trials and indictment of the leg balanceary Wilde on charges of sodomy and pederasty into a riveting and powerful document against social determinism. The theme of Kauffmans play is the ever-continuing conflict between art and morality and of course with such(prenominal) a theme, Wilde, the martyr to nineteenth century morality, with his assertion that there ar no immoral books, only badly written cardinals is the perfect hero.dr aft from a huge variety of sources that includes trial transcripts, journalistic articles, contemporary autobiographies (including the whiz by Wildes lover, Lord Alfred Douglas) and later biographies, Kauffman in the play achievementfully brings alive the past in a way that Wilde himself would have authorize of. The play breaks all generic boundaries and has the elements of a historical drama, a docudrama, a courtroom drama, a social commentary, tragedy and comedy all involute into one.The oft-repeated tale of Wildes fall from fame and fortune is by no essence old wine in advanced bottle, primarily because the playwrights in-depth enquiry brings in new liveliness into the tale by documenting new perspectives and exploring newer avenues and thereby problematizing the positions of victim and victimizer, secondarily because Kauffman concentrates in showing history in its own context and does not overtly attempt to make it contemporary, and at last because by showing Wildes plig ht in his confrontation with a world that found him fundamentally subversive to the interests of the society the playwright strikes an ordinary chord.Wildes passionate attempt to live a life on his own terms is superbly dramatized in the play. Most riveting atomic number 18 the dramatizations of those moments that change the life of the author for once and all. Such a black-market moment comes when Wilde denies kissing a young man with a humourous putdown of his looks instead of a straightforward no. In the first of the trine trials and in a climactic moment Wilde is asked by the prosecuting attorney Edward Carson, if he had ever kissed one of the young working class men with whom he was known to keep company.Wilde, with his suave and polished wit replies Oh, dear, no, He was a peculiarly plain boy. Carson leaps victoriously at the implication of such a comment, that Wilde would have kissed the boy if he was a little more winning and the authors fate is sealed. From this mom ent onwards the play takes on a destructive momentum as Wildes entire life spirals out of control betrayed by his own wit.Never again is he able to gain control of his life. Through the presentation of Wilde, with support from his lengthened research, Kauffman manages to subtly problematize the positions of victimizer and victim in the play. For as we find in the play, even before he stabs himself with his own clever tongue Wilde frittered external his prodigious talents by surrounding himself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. As he quotes from De Profundis towards the end of the play I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal jejuneness gave me a curious joy. Still, the intrinsic irony of the point that it is his suavity, wit and unrivaled craft with words that would bring his hurriedness is also highly emblematical as far as the theme of the play is concerned, for the play, among other things, engages with the usual Victorian debate o ver morality and art.Wilde refused to side with the dominant dissertate of compartmentalizing his personal erotic longings and keeping it separate from the aesthetic side of his life. And the fact that he raised his personal sense of morality to the level of an art turned out to be the ultimate source of his tragedy in an age which preferred to look at art as a mode moral dispensation for social welfare.Apart from tracing the tragic downfall of this hero with a sincerity and passion that raises Wildes conviction and his prematurely death to the level of a crucifixion so that the protagonist becomes a patron saint for all those whose life has been crippled by the assign moralities of a compulsively prohibitionist society, the play also successfully and subtly presents a multilevel study in public perceptions of class, art and sex and this is what makes Kauffmans themes universal.The playwright uses a choir of actors, who appear both on stage and in front of it posing as the inve stigators in a hearing, almost classical in its simplicity. This modern utter continuously reads, quotes or acts out from a huge variety of sources fruits of the playwrights research on his subject establishing an ever-shifting mosaic of perspectives. This chorus takes up several win over and often hilarious figurative perspectives.The multiple roles bring to the table the likes of faerie Victoria (the author of the Gross Indecency Law), and G. B. Shaw to name a few. The chorus quotes from the memoirs of Wilde and his lover, the accounts of Sir Edward Clarke and the editor Frank Harris. A particularly inspired scene is the one when a later day academic is brought into the play to deconstruct Wildes performance in court with insights that are nonetheless valid for world presented satirically.However the most hilarious of all these is probably the scene where the chorus dons long white underwear to display how Wilde procured his gross indecencies. The greatest success of Kauffma ns use of the chorus lies in the fact that by gist of it, very subtly but surely, he manages to communicate a sooner unsettling idea to the readers of the play that even in our age of individual freedom, we are not very far from the social Puritanism that crippled Wilde during his lifetime.