Performing on Beloved Sinner, the final days of Oscar Wilde, eminent Irish actor Denis Rafter moved the audience at Akshara with his talent and innate understanding of reckoning with the self, says Unnati Joshi
Beloved Sinner visits the ghosts of Irish writer Oscar Wilde but in a reflective soliloquy, salvages his spirituality and humanity and restores his significance in today’s times.
Seated at a small table outside a French café, Wilde reflects on his work, the tragic climax to a life of great triumphs and unbearable tragedy and explains to the audience what it was that led to his downfall. He still clings to his great sense of humour and brilliant wit, telling his story without self-pity and we see a very human figure who realises that his tragedy was mainly self-inflicted but that the punishment he suffered was cruel and vindictive. For years he was not allowed to see his two young sons, his mother died while still in prison. Yet, there is no hate in his heart and he shows a deep compassion for those who still suffer from the moral hypocrisy of a Victorian society of which he himself was a victim.
“Beloved Sinner is a contraction in itself as we regard sinners as ‘un-beloved’ whereas Oscar Wilde proves the opposite. Although he was regarded as a great sinner of his time, he is very beloved now. The title came to me normally like any other title comes, from some of his works. This show is my respect for him. This would also make people think that people who are suffering or have committed some wrong are not always unloved,” says Irish actor Denis Rafter, who is known for reinterpreting literary figures through innovative formats, some of which he scripts himself.
He gives a profoundly human insight into some of Wilde’s best known writings such as, The Nightingale and the Rose, The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Ballad of Reading Gaol. The result is a highly dramatic and captivating encounter with Wilde’s tragic heroes, that is both touching and self-deprecatory.
“What attracted me towards Wilde’s tragedy was, within his rising, as he says himself, was a premonition. And Indians would understand this better, I feel, as you believe more in destiny and karma. If you want to understand life, you try talking to sinner. Many of the great saints have been sinners in the earthly context. This attracted me to the contradiction that probably he didn’t realise himself how deep his morality was,” he tells us.
Rafter is a highly acclaimed actor and director. Originally from Ireland, he has spent most of his professional theatre career working in Spain. He first studied acting at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and later at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in london. In Spain, he has directed over 50 shows, including plays by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Calderon, Valle Inclan, Beckett, Pinter and many contemporary writers such as Martin McDonagh, Mike Bartlett. He has also showcased many of Spain’s current playwrights.
“My journey started very young. I think I was born an actor,” he smiles. “But that’s not special because many people are born great scientists and many people are born with the tremendous ability of curing. The most important thing about any talent is that you don’t waste it and follow it. And very young, I followed it; it’s not an easy path because you have to overcome your inadequacies, fears and your own lack of confidence. The actor is always fighting with that. But now in my matured days or my twilight years, I find that to communicate the feeling with the audience is essential and for me it’s my life’s fulfillment,” he adds.
About the challenges of portrayal, he shares, “The main challenge of the director is to keep it minimalistic. The challenge for the actor is to do great credit to Wilde. And the object is to make people love what he stood for. When you play Oscar Wilde, there’s not an element of gayness in it. I think that would be an exterior element that would distract. There’s no loose hands when you play Oscar.
“When you are doing a work on Wilde, the problem is what to leave out. People come to me asking why you didn’t do this and that. There’s so much there but I follow the line. First of all, a dramatic structure has to be there when you are mixing humour. I don’t want him to look self-pitying. I want him to look forceful and to be humorous, because he was like that till the end. The pieces that I have used, like The Nightingale and the Rose, is very important from his point of view of love. The Ballad of Reading Gaol is very important from the point of view of forgiveness and understanding. He didn’t say that the soldier shouldn’t be executed, he said, even though he has done this, he should be treated humanely,” he says as he stands up and takes the stage to recite the lines from The Ballad of Reading Gaol. “He did not wear his scarlet coat, for blood and wine are red. And blood and wine were on his hands, when they found him with the dead. The poor dead woman whom he loved and murdered in her bed. In Dorian Gray again, it is important because of the moral impact it has,” he adds.
What made him bring Beloved Sinner to IndiaIJ “All great writers have a great genius of communicating universal feelings and that is why these writers touch the fundamental human core. I think that Wilde is universal and that is why I have come here with this play. I have also come here to learn about Indian culture. I think Western culture to a certain extent can be too self-indulgent and I think there’s so much we can learn from other cultures and very importantly from Indian culture,” he shares.
Rafter feels that the tragedy of Wilde’s life is that he couldn’t continue to write. “He had very little time to write after he went to jail. First of all nobody wanted to publish him and second, his whole life was destroyed. His wife died when he came out of prison, his mother died while he was in prison, his two boys were taken from him and he became very ill. So that wasn’t an environment for him to write. There wasn’t any transformation in Wilde’s writing in jail but certainly a big transformation in him and that transformation was tragic. That’s the tragedy of Wilde’s life. The tragedy of Wilde is not that he died, the tragedy was that he didn’t continue to write. I think he could have written many great works on the experiences he had.
“He also wrote a letter to the University of Belfast saying that they should allow women to study. His greatest moment was cut short. But let us not forget that he was self-destructive too,” says Rafter. Yet when on stage he utters the famous lines, “Don’t we all kill the thing we loveIJ,” it sets us thinking.
“Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard.
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!”
The line was an allusion to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, reversed in typical Wildean fashion. In the play, Bassanio asks “Do all men kill the things they do not loveIJ” For Wilde, self-realisation came through suffering. And morality to him was his own and not what was sanctioned by society.