The Daily Telegraph - Saturday, April 13, 1895

THE DRAMA.

"The new year reveals Mr. Oscar Wilde in a fresh light," says the "St. James's Budget" of "An Ideal Husband," which is to be produced at the Lyceum to-night: "it almost serves to prove that as a playwright he has sown his wild oats." The story of the piece is recounted thus:— "Sir Robert Chiltern, the hero, is regarded by wife and friends as an ideal husband, an honorable gentleman, a stainless politician; and it is not until the arrival of Mrs. Cheveley that his wife discovers how, 20 years previously, he had sold a Cabinet secret entrusted to him by his chief, and with the proceeds of the nefarious bargain secured a sum that formed the foundation of his later fortunes. This secret Sir Robert had, with singular faculty, communicated to a certain Baron Arnheim in a letter, which in course of time fell into the hands of Mrs. Cheveley, whose first impulse was naturally to use it for purposes of blackmail. Sir Robert recognises that he is helpless against such proofs of his former treachery, but, happily, his cause is espoused by Lord Goring, one of those good-natured do-nothing simpletons who on the stage invariably prove a match for the astute and unscrupulous adventurers. In this way the interest of the play is abruptly transferred from hero and heroine to Lord Goring and Mrs. Cheveley—a circumstance somewhat disconcerting, although pardonable in view of the subsequent admirably written, and no less admirably played, scenes to which it gives rise. That Lord Goring eventually triumphs need hardly be said, or that Sir Robert and Lady Chiltern are finally reconciled."

It is a comical exhibition of virtue, that which is being given by the theatrical managers who go on producing Oscar Wilde's plays, but cut Oscar Wilde's name out of the bill. It's ridiculous, in the first place, because about 39 out of every 100 people who go to see "An Ideal Husband" at the Lyceum to-night, for example, know full well who wrote the play and what the condition of the author is at date. Look at the affair through the spectacles of fairness. A man's play is going to be staged by certain persons, whose hope is that they will make money out of it; but as far as those persons can deny him any credit for writing the play, they will do it. A man writes a play, of which a virtuous London critic (not Mr. Clement Scott) says that its striking merits are "healthy tone and wholesome teaching;" but because the man has since been accused of a crime, the theatre manager will not say his name openly. The play is apparently clever and chaste withal; then who should sink the identity of the author because of something else he did—au contraire, is there not the more reason why full benefit should be given him in his hour of moral need of all the creditable things he has done? And this above all is to be remembered, that Oscar Wilde is still sub judice.