Oscar Wilde was an astonishing and distinctive raconteur, a literary pathfinder, an icon of homosexuality and queer identity — and the new Australian Ballet production of ‘Oscar’ does his rakishly queer legacy proud. This lionised Irish poet and playwright has been a paragon of queerness—our identity, our joy, our persecution and resilience—spanning generations. The profoundness of Wilde’s impact on the LGBTQIA+ community and our history is so enormous that it is its own superlative, and it is simply impossible to state this too strongly.
In fact, the story and impact of Oscar Wilde is so truly enormous that it’s genuinely a marvel that The Australian Ballet ’s newest production, Oscar , about the life of the queer literary wunderkind, knew where to even begin with choosing how to tell his story. But somehow, they whittled the bigness of Wilde’s life down; melding together his life story and his creative work, somehow distilling his tragically, joyously queer life and works into two marvellous acts. While Oscar Wilde is known today as a literary genius, he is one of the many LGBTQIA+ people celebrated nowhere near as much as they should have been in their own time.
Wilde’s plays, such as An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, were admittedly popular, but his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray , was controversial from the moment of its release. Like many queer folks of Victorian times, Wilde hid in the plain sight of a heterosexual marria.
