When David Hare’s play was first seen in 1998, it suffered from the miscasting of the central roles of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie). Now, in Neil Armfield’s fine revival, it looks a much richer play – confirming Wilde’s aphorism that “a truth in art is that whose contrary is also true”. The Wilde that emerges is a multifaceted character: one who can either be admired for his uncompromising moral integrity, or pitied for his wilful capacity for self-destruction.

This is the most convincing dramatic portrait of Wilde that I have come across – one that captures him as both romantic individualist and tragic victim. It also allows Rupert Everett to give the performance of his career. Everett’s Wilde is the big, fleshy, heavy-jowled figure we see in the later portraits and the Max Beerbohm cartoons. But there is deep pathos in the way his blubbery features crumple into tears when confronted by the generosity of hotel servants, and a rich vein of anger when, shunned by his friends and isolated from his children, he rails against society’s demand for penance as well as punishment. Yet Everett never lets us forget Wilde’s enduring intelligence: when the treacherous Bosie denies he was ever homosexual, Everett sardonically mutters: “No, just a brilliant mimic.”

Freddie Fox does all he can with Bosie, suggesting that, beneath the tantrums, he was governed by the aristocratic urge for self-preservation, and there is good support from Cal MacAninch, whose eminently sane Robbie Ross plays Horatio to Wilde’s reckless Hamlet. I was moved by Hare’s searching portrait of a one-sided love that for Wilde proved to be salvation and destroyer alike…

 

The Judas Kiss still stands arrestingly disrobed before us, all the same, as a scintillating play of ideas whose power stealthily increases. Wilde has every reason to seize the chance to flee England – as advised by his loyal friend Robbie Ross (Cal MacAninch, superb in his withheld exasperation) – but he elects to stay on and fight a losing battle. He has every reason to revile the flighty Bosie (played with fantastic child-in-a-nursery petulance by Freddie Fox, son of Edward, and heir to his talents, too), yet he holds true to him.

This isn’t through mere obstinacy, vanity, infatuation or a messianic sense of himself as fated to wear the thorny crown of suffering – though these motivations are aired as explanations for his self-made downfall.

In the end, Hare, ably suggests, Wilde stayed true to his faith in beauty, “above everything, and in all things”, and with it the rejection of “what is called morality” – even if that meant ruin, separation from his children, and the loss of his talent. Without his cleaving to an integrity his own age could not recognise, our own would the poorer.

You can see that, grandiosely, in Christ-like terms of sacrifice, but strip away the mythology that has grown up around Wilde, and you behold instead just a remarkable man making ordinary, necessary choices.

Hare skilfully mixes Victorian class snobbery and anti-Irish prejudice into his exploration of the hypocrisy weighted onto Wilde’s shoulders, and presents a fascinating portrait of the battle-of-wills between ex-lovers Robbie Ross and Bosie over whether Wilde should flee to France or stay in London post-trial. Cal Macaninch’s Ross is agonised by unrequited love, while Freddie Fox is a revelation as Bosie: a beautiful, spoilt boy with daddy issues who sees himself as a victim even as he brings about Wilde’s downfall.

Initially, Rupert Everett’s Wilde seems flamboyantly familiar. But as the writer loses everything, we understand that this was deliberate. Replacing drolly-delivered quips with weary wisdom, Everett movingly reveals a Wilde for whom superficiality has been self-protection.

Some argued that casting was a weakness of the original West End production of ‘The Judas Kiss’. But it’s just one of many strengths in Armfield’s well-paced, funny and poignant production.

As an absorbing Oscar, Rupert Everett is padded to simulate Wilde’s fleshy frame, his face, beneath a centre-parted wig, sagging with anxiety and incipient despair. He moves with a weary flourish, as if the business of maintaining his celebrated persona has become exhausting. Cal MacAninch’s gentle, grave Robbie Ross, Wilde’s friend and former lover, offers the succour that’s in short supply from Freddie Fox’s impossibly pretty Bosie, sneering, snorting and stamping his feet as he propels Oscar towards disaster out of arrogance, naivety and a desire to spite his own hated father.

Everett is desperately moving as he breaks down helplessly over his lobster lunch, and later as, in a rat-infested apartment near Naples, he sits, grey-skinned and penniless, confined to a chair in almost Beckettian fatalistic desolation, awaiting Bosie’s final act of treachery. Fox makes Douglas more than a spoilt, aristocratic brat; if what he feels for Wilde isn’t love, there is tenderness in it; his rants against the society that condemns them is a muddle of shame, indignation and a penchant for playing the victim.

In the production’s final moments, Rick Fisher’s eloquent lighting creates such a huge shadow of Fox that he seems to tower over the hunched Everett like the Selfish Giant of Wilde’s story for children. The worship of this beautiful monster has helped destroy Oscar, and Everett’s Wilde is almost serenely aware that Bosie is unworthy of such devotion; his rage is reserved for a hypocritical morality that continues to punish him after his sentence is served. He is tragic, heroic, human: a flawed Christ figure, fascinating and deeply affecting.

The young and currently ubiquitous Freddie Fox is perfectly petulant as the privileged, preening Bosie who is so shallow he makes a puddle of water look deep. He’s so keen to throw his toys out of the pram that you can’t help but question whether he really could have been that irritatingly selfish. If so, you hunger after some explanation which is seemingly absent here.

Wilde’s loyal former lover Robbie (the stern-faced Cal Macaninch) provides a nice contrast, being as restrained as Bosie is highly strung but seeing Everett in luscious full flow will undoubtedly prove the draw here. And while Hare is certainly more concerned about the man beneath the well-crafted quips, he does give Wilde some choice one-liners.

“Christ died at six. He died at cocktail hour,” he reflects at one point. It’s also the hour, we learn, that Wilde would cry, alone, every night in prison.