Wilde things, they make our hearts sing

DANCE

Ocsar

The Australian Ballet, Regent Theatre, until Sept 24 Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

Christopher Wheeldon’s Oscar, with its richly theatrical score by Joby Talbot, is a daring but fantastically rewarding experiment in ballet storytelling. It’s engrossing, discomforting, energising, uplifting and sometimes grating, but also determinedly different.

The ballet’s premiere is a signal event for The Australian Ballet: the first full-length narrative ballet commissioned by the company in more than 20 years, and the first performance in their new home in the Regent Theatre on bustling Collins Street.

It’s also the first time the company has staged a ballet that is a manifest depiction of homosexual love. Indeed, around the world, despite the regular appearance of new ballets, such depictions are vanishingly few.

For Wheeldon, however, Oscar can be seen as part of an ongoing exploration of the possibilities for telling stories through dance, a project he began 10 years ago with his three-act adaptation of The Winter’s Tale for the Royal Ballet in London.

Oscar, by contrast, is a two-act ballet with a prologue and epilogue, running for about two hours. And while it’s ostensibly an account of the emotional and sexual life of the playwright and poet Oscar Wilde, it has the semblance of a dream.

It opens with Wilde’s conviction in May 1895 on charges of gross indecency. Imprisoned for two years, alone in his cell, he lets memory work its doleful magic. He is transported to a family excursion where he reads one of his own fairytales to his wife and children.

There is a vision within a vision, images develop associatively as the action moves fluidly between the cell, the fairytale and Wilde’s memories. We go forwards and backwards, and yet the development of the emotional line is remarkably clear.

The characterisation of Oscar Wilde by Callum Linnane is convincing in its unforced simplicity. And Ako Kondo as the nightingale in the fairytale magnificently suggests the fragility – the paltriness – of Wilde’s connection with his wife and his own heterosexual identity.

The second act is similarly patterned, combining memories of Wilde’s affair with Lord Alfred Douglas (Benjamin Garrett) with a fretful sketch of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde himself appears as the figure in the portrait that ages while its subject remains forever youthful.

For the most part, Wheeldon’s choreography has a timeless, almost yearning, quality – full of allusion and metaphor – which he punctuates with woozy exaggerations, playful parodies and pitiful spasms.

But it is impossible to detail all the achievements of this production here. There is the strength of the ensemble, the power of the orchestra, the dynamism of the staging, the allround theatre craft. It goes on and on.

Of course, we get only a partial view of Wilde’s life. How could it be anything else? And yet, with its daring confusion of life and art in ways that can seem like a trap for the unwary spectator, Oscar has a quality – a strangeness and a glamour – that is authentically and triumphantly Wildean.