TV & Radio

Oscar Wilde’s ‘crucial’ role in the gay rights struggle

TV review: TG4 celebrates the life and legacy of one of the greatest figures in Irish literature

Oscar Wilde with Lord Alfred Douglas at Oxford in 1893. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

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Ed Power
Wed Jan 27 2021 - 21:00

Oscar Wilde and his legacy have obviously never gone away. But now, a little over 120 years since his death at age 46, and surely as he would have wished, he’s back in the spotlight.

On February 1st the BBC will revisit the disastrous libel trial that brought Wilde down, and the central role played by barrister and unionist politician Edward Carson, in Edward Carson and the Fall of Oscar Wilde.

But before that, TG4 explores Wilde’s wild romance with Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas as part of its Scéalta Grá na hÉireann season (TG4, 8.30pm). The series has also investigated the love triangle between Michael Collins, Kitty Kiernan and Collins’ best friend Harry Boland and the relationship between Robert Emmett and Sarah Curran.

The Wilde episode is hardly groundbreaking and the bare-bones of the story will already be familiar. Yet the tale is told with verve while the glamour and the squalor of Victorian London is vividly evoked with watercolours which come to life as the camera pans across the screen.

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Wilde emerges a rock star born before his time. As contributors such as Senator David Norris and Marianne Ní Chinnéide of NUIG relay, he was a writer who felt passionately that art should be celebrated for its own sake rather than for any “moral” message. This ran contrary to the received wisdom of the Victorian age.

He was also a bon vivant who believed in testing social constraints to their limits. A tempestuous affair with the wilful Bosie made him a target of his lover’s brutish father, John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry. Like a hunter stalking its prey,  the Marquess calculatingly libelled Wilde in order to bait him into seeking legal recourse.

This, then, is bite-sized history done well. It doesn’t get bogged down in extraneous detail. And the re-enactments, in which actors playing Wilde and Bosie pose for a photograph and take tea, are employed sparingly (is there anything more tiresome than a documentary that wants to be a costume drama?).

The trial ruined Wilde. Yet this succinct documentary is ultimately a celebration of the life and legacy of one of the greatest figures in Irish literature rather than a lament for his downfall. We are reminded, in particular, of Wilde’s significance in the centuries-long struggle for gay rights.

“Wilde was absolutely crucial,” says Norris. “The name Wilde is associated forever with homosexuality. Homosexuality was not spoken about at all during the Victorian period and in fact up until quite recently. Because of Wilde it became a subject for conversation.”