This centenary celebration is certainly Wilde, but it doesn't make for a particularly wild night. In fact there is more than a whiff of the genteel literary festival about the affair that pairs an edited version of De Profundis, the letter that Oscar Wilde wrote to his former lover Lord Alfred Douglas while in Reading jail, with a brief two-hander. The latter, In Extremis, is spun from the fact that a week before the trial that was to cost Wilde so much, and while friends were urging him to flee abroad, he consulted a palmist called Mrs Robinson. She told him the trial would be a triumph.
If the National wanted to mark the anniversary of Wilde's death, staging one of his plays would surely have been more generous. This feels more like something cooked up for the Wilde bandwagon than a real celebration. It plays to the idea that we are more interested in the man than in his work and to our need to make his story our own. That said, De Profundis, with its mixture of arrogance and humility, foolishness and wisdom, can hardly fail to move as it details Wilde's acceptance of his artistic and moral destruction.
This is a man imprisoned not by bars but by the madness of love and its expiration. Corin Redgrave plays Wilde in his prison garb, remembering and reproaching both himself and Bosie. He is like a grand mansion once ablaze with lights that has been reduced to a smoking ruin. It is a remarkable performance; my only doubt is whether a theatre is the place for it. Performing in Reading jail to inmates would be a different matter.
The first half, In Extremis, presents a different Wilde, one still cocooned from the realities, a dandy with lemon yellow gloves and what Mrs Robinson calls "sensual, selfish hands". This Wilde looks permanently pained.
Neil Bartlett's play is too insubstantial to be more than a footnote, but there is some fun in the idea of two people who are sufficient charlatans to kid not just each other but also themselves. Sheila Hancock's Mrs Robinson is a girlish waxwork. Funeral lilies haunt the parlour as if a tragedy has already happened when, in fact, disaster is still rushing Wilde's way.
"A triumph," insists Mrs Robinson. And perhaps she was right. De Profundis leaves you wondering whether the events that broke Wilde were also the making of him. It is evidence that amidst the ruins of his life, he took responsibility for his folly and saw not just Bosie for what he really was, but also himself.
Until December 16. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
