The Times, 16 April 1990, by Benedict Nightingale
"Dated witch-hunt which makes sense as author's cool self-
revelation"
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Oscar Wilde was an ingratiating opportunist; Oscar Wilde was 
a sly subservice. Either case can be sustained on the 
evidence of this,his first theatrical success. It is 
sentimental, melodramatic and mechanically constructed, yet 
full of impish humour. It seeks to flatter and beguile the 
upper classes, but also to criticize their rigidity and 
unbend their backbones a bit.

It goes without saying that the play has dated. I suspect 
that the people of Bristol have rather stiffer, or at least 
less rubbery, backbones than the metropolitan norm; but they 
scarcely need telling that it is a little unfair to hound 
that figure who so fascinated the late Victorians and their 
dramatists, the Woman with a Past. Indeed, Wilde's qualified 
defence of his Mrs. Erlynne would probably have seeemed 
dated to Wycherley and Etherege, who wrote 200 years before 
him.

Still, her fate is less extreme than that of Pinero's Mrs. 
Tanqueray or a dozen others. Suicide or beggary was how they 
atoned for sexual indiscretion. Wilde allows his Woman with 
a Past to lure a dim aristocrat into marriage and, more 
importantly, to emerge with a bit of moral credit.

Mrs. Erlynne is a blackmailer, by her own admission "not 
worth a moment's sorro"; but she still sacrifices herself to 
save her daughter from plunging into the social pit.

Maggie Steed strolls confidently through the role at 
Bristol, bestowing white, wolfish smiles on those whose 
gentility she envies. You get the impression she has come 
from nibbling pieces of marinated Red Riding Hood over 
champagne at the Cafe Royal, and is peckish for desert.

She is less successful when she belatedly discovers in 
herself maternal love for Lady Windermere, the child she 
abandoned years before; but then the author's forte was not 
the heaving climax, nor is Robert Carsen's production strong 
on emotion.

Perhaps it is the mannered language that inhibits the cast; 
perhaps it is Anthony Ward's stately if graceful set, with 
its vistas of towering cream panelling. Certainly Joely 
Richardson's Lady Windermere--poised, elegant, and 
inexplicably dressed in white when even the ingenues at her 
second-act ball wear black as she is--seems about as likely 
to lam furiously out of her husband's life as a Meissen 
china shepherdess is likely to storm off its mantelpiece.

What remains is a play still worth attention, both for its 
nimble wit and for its oblique insights into Wilde's own, 
increasingly perilous way of life. *Lady Windermere's Fan* 
is where a cynic is definitely described as someone "who 
knows the price of everything and the value of nothing" and 
scandal as "gossip made tedious by morality."

It also ends with its most priggish character, Lady 
Windermere herself, putting the case for tolerance and moral 
complexity--"there is the same world for us all, and good 
and evil, sin and innocence, go through it hand in hand."

Hollow words for Wilde, who actually spent the night of the 
play's opening with Edward Shelley, the clerk who would 
figure in his trial four years later. When Mrs. Erlynne 
talks of being "despised, mocked, abandoned, sneered at," 
and forced to "pay for one's sin, pay again, and pay all 
one's life," she might be reading her author's palm. The 
Woman with a Past was, so to speak, Wilde's own future.



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                     Bentley's Bedlam
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