An Ideal Husband, Program Notes

“There’s nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It’s a thing no married man knows anything about.”
--Oscar Wilde from Lady Windemere’s Fan

From George Bernard Shaw’s review of the original production of An Ideal Husband (1895): “Mr. Wilde’s new play at the Haymarket is  dangerous, because he makes his critics dull.  They laugh angrily at his epigrams…protest that the trick is obvious, and that such epigrams can be turned out by the score by anyone lightminded enough to condescend to such frivolity.  As far as I can ascertain, I am the only person in London who cannot sit down and write an Oscar Wilde play at will.  The fact that his plays, although apparently lucrative, remain unique…says much for the self-denial of our scribes. In a certain sense, Mr. Wilde is to me our only thorough playwright. He plays with everything:  with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and the audience, with the whole theatre…”

In the summer of 1893,  Oscar Wilde began work on An Ideal Husband at Goring-on-Thames, appropriating the town’s name for the character Lord Goring.  Lewis Waller, one of the first “modern” matinee-idols accepted the finished play for production at London’s Haymarket Theatre and cast himself as Sir Robert Chiltern. Rehearsals began in late December 1894, with Wilde very much in attendance, even insisting the cast rehearse on Christmas Day. The Prince of Wales attended the successful opening on January 3, 1895, and afterwards sent for the playwright to congratulate him. When Wilde was asked by The Sketch Magazine if there were any chief points he thought critics might have missed in his play, he responded: “Its entire psychology—the difference in the way a man loves a woman from that in which a woman loves a man, the passion that women have for making “ideals” (which is their weakness) and the weakness of a man who dares not show his imperfections to the thing he loves…They really thought it was a play about a bracelet.  We must educate our critics—we really must educate them…” An Ideal Husband played to packed houses until April 1895, when Wilde was arrested, tried and imprisoned for two years at hard labor for 'gross indecency'. His name was quickly taken off both An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, also running successfully in the West End. Both productions were shuttered within weeks. When An Ideal Husband was published in 1899, the playwright’s name was left out.

An Ideal Husband is the most serious of Wilde's social comedies. Its plot was directly influenced by the Panama Canal scandals in Paris in 1893. In 1881 the French press and legislature had whipped the public into a patriotic fervor with the idea of France uniting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans by building a canal across Panama. In response capital was raised from over 100,000 mostly small investors, and the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique began work on the ill-planned, badly engineered project.  By December 1888, $287,000,000 had been spent, 50,000,000 cubic meters of earth had been moved, 20,000 men had died, but only 11 miles of canal had been dug. In February 1889, the mismanaged and corrupt Compagnie Universelle went bankrupt, and the word “Panama” became a synonym for scandal and fraud. A government commission discovered that the Compagnie had improperly paid no less than $600,000 to Senators and Deputies, to influence them to promote the canal. The wholesale bribery of the Paris press was likewise revealed. Over 100 members of the Legislature were implicated in the scandal, and the Cabinet resigned. The leaders of the Compagnie were condemned  on February 9, 1893, but the decree of the court was set aside because the statute of limitations had expired. In 1904 an American company began work on the present day Panama canal.

Wilde’s comedy is set in motion by several factors: the corrupt sources of great wealth--of which the public is usually ignorant; the increasing influence of money on political life; the fiscal power of inside information and the social power of secret knowledge.  It’s as if he’d been reading today’s headlines. But the genius of An Ideal Husband, and one of its great charms, is that Wilde’s resolution lies not in the exposure of hypocrisy, but in the gradual expansion of human tenderness.