Through the support of anonymous donors, Cambridge University now has access to the Classic Spring Oscar Wilde Collection on Drama Online.
The Oscar Wilde Season at the Vaudeville in October 2018 was the first offering from Classic Spring, Dominic Dromgoole’s new theatre company, founded as he left Shakespeare’s Globe. The season revolved around Wilde’s four great Victorian plays, which shocked and redefined British theatre when first performed, and still resonate today.
The available plays are:
LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN
The day of Lady Windermere’s birthday party, and all is perfectly in order. Until her friend Lord Darlington plants a seed of suspicion. Is her husband having an affair? And will the other woman really attend the party? First performed in 1892, Lady Windermere’s Fan explores the ambiguity of upper class morality and the fragile position of women in the late Victorian era. It has always proved one of Wilde’s most popular and witty plays.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST
Widely considered one of the funniest plays in English, Wilde’s much loved masterpiece throws love, logic and language into the air to make one of theatre’s most dazzling firework displays. Jack, Algy, Gwendolyn and Cecily discover how unsmooth runs the course of true love, while Lady Bracknell keeps a baleful eye on this mayhem of manners.
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE
An earnest young American woman, a louche English lord, and an innocent young chap join a house party of fin de siècle fools and grotesques. Nearby a woman lives, cradling a long buried secret. Wilde’s marriage of glittering wit and Ibsenite drama create a vivid new theatrical voice.
AN IDEAL HUSBAND
The Rolls-Royce of English comedies, this entertaining and still topical play brings an act of political sin into the heart of the English home. As an ambitious government minister, Sir Robert Chiltern’s smooth ascent to the top seems assured, until Mrs Cheveley appears in London with damning proof of a previous financial scandal.
Electronic Collection Management 