Review-Constance-Perilous Mouths
9-5-14
By: Tom Hope
Behind every great man, they say, is an even greater woman. By that reckoning, Constance Holland nee Lloyd (the woman who loved, married, stood by and then separated from the great Oscar Wilde before pre-deceasing him at the age of 39) must have been pretty amazing as well as amazingly pretty.
What makes this carefully researched and beautifully presented tribute so special is the compassion and affection which shines through for each of them – and their apparent affection for each other - in charting Oscar’s fall from grace and Constance’s consequent reluctant uncoupling from him, to protect herself and their two sons Cyril and Vyvyan.
What’s also striking is the assured way the story unfolds through a zig-zag of time shifts, showing Constance first at the depth of her despair at her husband’s ‘outing’, then the height of her exhilarated love as his bride-to-be, then speaking up for her man as he faces trial… and always with the great Oscar an ever-present but never seen player.
Cathy Haines as Constance has quite a cloth to weave in working this dramatic loom and she does it brilliantly, shuttling from breathless ingénue to resolutely defiant mother – via other personas along the way – with a grace and energy which is always watchable and believable.
While she drives the show, the rest of the cast (Clare Stearns included) do a great job of conjuring up the world in which Constance and Oscar moved and which cared so schizophrenically for them. I expected doubling up aplenty but no, each stays elegantly and surely in their single roles to enhance the dramatic effect of late Victorian assurance. There’s choric interpretation from Charlotte Emery singing pointed selections from Gilbert & Sullivan’s ‘Patience’, their opera which lampooned the aesthetic movement with which Wilde was so firmly associated. It’s a measure of the production’s positioning that music director Forrest Morr (who performs live on piano throughout) has arranged these G&S pieces so you don’t hear them that way, the lyrical rhythms and melodies underscored by unexpectedly modern dissonances.
There’s further assurance in the way dramatic devices are deployed to take us outside the comfort of the historical rebuild. There’s an especially effective dance sequence which transitions into Wildean quotes over-scored by demonic applause and laughter to evoke Constance’s sense of entrapment by a world she and Oscar sought to challenge as much as charm. Lighting (Van Chiu) and soundscapes (Adam Harris) heighten this dysjunction of style and serendipity to excellent effect.
So it’s a chamber work but not simply a period piece. Much of what’s said is replicated from authentic source material but that material has been sliced and diced into what’s very much a drama and, as Clare Stearns puts it in her programme notes, a work of fiction.
In those same notes, she describes how she fell in love with Oscar Wilde at the tender age of 12 because of his beautiful stories. The strength of this piece lies in the beautiful telling of a not-so-beautiful story and its reconstruction of how Constance must have struggled to stay true to her sense of self as mother, lover and modernist.
If you doubt the relevance of any of this to our own time and place, think any number of HK wives trying to hold their family together despite an unravelling marriage. Think too of how Oscar Wilde’s work is now required reading for just about every English literature syllabus in Hong Kong or for that matter the world. And then (I suggest) take this chance to see for yourself how such a great mind might seem when viewed from a side-long and feminine perspective.
Constance is playing at the Fringe Club through May 10th. For more information, click here.
Comments
Mary Jane Denton
I was at drama school with Clare when she fell in love with Oscar Wilde. So proud of you Clare as would Mrs Sander be.
14 May 2014