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The Judas Kiss

One of the season's most intriguing pieces of casting -- Liam Neeson as Oscar Wilde -- turns out to be the most acutely disappointing element of David Hare's "The Judas Kiss," the latest manifestation of the current cultural fascination with the persecuted playwright, a trend that is turning Oscar and Bosie into the Charles and Diana of literary history.

One of the season’s most intriguing pieces of casting — Liam Neeson as Oscar Wilde — turns out to be the most acutely disappointing element of David Hare’s “The Judas Kiss,” the latest manifestation of the current cultural fascination with the persecuted playwright, a trend that is turning Oscar and Bosie into the Charles and Diana of literary history. With their doomed love and its consequences providing endless fodder for media manipulation, can a two-hour A&E “Biography” special be far behind?

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In interviews following the play’s mixed reception in London, Hare has made clear his intention to use the Bosie-Oscar relationship as a prism through which to examine the phenomenon of “sacrificial love.” And, indeed, in Wilde’s almost lifelong devotion to the man who was inarguably the instigator of his disgrace, there’s a strange and sad nobility that bears examining.

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But Neeson’s performance works against this primary tenet of Hare’s play: Where “The Judas Kiss” needs a radiantly loving Wilde at its center, a man rich in feeling who loves not wisely but too well, Neeson provides only dryness and detachment, witty phrasing and diffident bonhomie. The fault is not entirely his; Hare’s portrait of Wilde is perhaps too studiously unsentimental. In the end, such is the imbalance in the play’s emotional texture that Bosie’s devotion to Oscar — limited, self-interested and immature though it is clearly shown to be — is more palpably felt than Oscar’s more profound affection for Bosie. The play’s point on paper is thus undermined on the stage.

The first act of “The Judas Kiss” takes place in London’s Cadogan Hotel, immediately following the dismissal of Wilde’s libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Lord Alfred Douglas, aka Bosie (Tom Hollander). Queensberry had, as surely most New York theatergoers now know, accused Wilde publicly of being a “sodomite.” With the government expected to bring a case of “gross indecency” against Wilde imminently, Wilde’s young friend and former lover Robbie Ross (a sharp Peter Capaldi) pleads with Bosie to join him in urging Oscar to flee to the Continent. But Bosie won’t oblige; he wants Oscar to stay and fight, and uses the allure of his presence to press his point.

If any playwright can turn an hour of indecision into compelling theater, it’s Hare, whose “Skylight” transformed a similarly unresolved question of allegiance into an evening of dramatic electricity. And Hollander’s Bosie, who looks appropriately and amusingly like a debauched cherub, spars with Capaldi’s Ross with entertaining, barely concealed animosity. (Insisting later on his own martyrdom — “There are two people who have suffered here!” — the very fine and funny Hollander sounds uncannily like Jennifer Saunders’ self-obsessed Edina in “Absolutely Fabulous.”)

Hare has fashioned his Wilde as a man blithely resigned to his fate at the hands of English hypocrisy and xenophobia. The problem is, in Neeson’s performance, Wilde seems indifferent not just to his fate, but to everyone around him. Neeson’s moments of affectionate regard for the Cadogan servants ring hollow when they should be emblematic of his immense generosity of spirit. And his fondness for Bosie seems mild and avuncular, not undying and passionate. Ultimately Wilde’s stasis can’t help but drain the first act of urgency; if he remains unmoved, why shouldn’t we?

The play’s superior second act takes up Bosie and Oscar’s story more than two years later, in Italy, where the disgraced Wilde has fled with Bosie following two years of hard labor that broke both his health and his spirit. (During intermission, audiences should be handed an abridged version of “De Profundis,” the magnificent piece of epistolary literature that Wilde wrote while in Reading Gaol, in which he repudiated Bosie and ended their friendship. Knowledge of its contents adds immense poignancy to their reconciliation.)

Bob Crowley’s second-act set works strange wonders, as his work so often does, with its vast whiteness quietly bespeaking the aridity of Wilde’s later life. While Bosie dallies with an Italian boy with the unlikely name of Galileo, Wilde receives a final visit from Robbie, who begs him to forsake Bosie, and thus regain his wife’s approbation — and her meager financial support. But Wilde stands by his man: “A patriot put in prison for loving his country goes on loving his country. A poet in prison for loving boys loves boys.”

But here again, Neeson’s performance combines with Hare’s exactingly unsentimental portrait of Wilde to drain the play of all emotional weight. Hare has said that he admires Wilde for his refusal to play the victim, and his intention seems also to have been to avoid portraying Wilde as a figure of pathos, in thrall to a young man’s beauty; but the alternative is worse: Oscar comes across in the second act as a man of spite, returned to Bosie’s side not out of love and need but to annoy those who demanded he forsake him. And he greets Bosie’s final betrayal with an equanimity that’s deflating.

Only an actor with an extraordinary ability to convey unspoken feeling could triumph in this role. In his wish to avoid a tragically romantic conception of Wilde, Hare has scattered Oscar’s moments of emotion among a few stage directions. Although Neeson speaks Hare’s always shapely dialogue with intelligence and relish, he conveys no heart in the role, a problem the always astute director Richard Eyre is at a loss to correct. The man of feeling simply isn’t there.

“The performance of the actor will not determine the action,” Hare’s Wilde says by way of excusing his submission to fate, but Neeson’s valiant but ineffectual performance proves the contrary: It does determine the action here, and the result is a negation of the playwright’s intention.

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The Judas Kiss

Broadhurst Theater; 1,186 seats; $60 top

  • Production: A Robert Fox, Scott Rudin, Roger Berlind, Joan Cullman and the Shubert Organization presentation of the Almeida Theatre Co. production of a play in two acts by David Hare. Directed by Richard Eyre.
  • Crew: Sets and costumes, Bob Crowley; lighting, Mark Henderson; music, George Fenton; sound, John A. Leonard; production stage manager, Susie Cordon; casting, Daniel Swee, Patsy Pollack. Reviewed April 27. Running time: 2 HOURS, 15 MIN.
  • Cast: Phoebe Cane - Stina Nielsen Arthur Wellesley - Alex Walkinshaw Sandy Moffatt - Richard Clarke Robert Ross - Peter Capaldi Lord Alfred Douglas - Tom Hollander Oscar Wilde - Liam Neeson Galileo Masconi - Daniel Serafini-Sauli

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