Oscar Wilde is having a moment on both stage and screen. Little wonder, says Anna Moloney – he would have adored our age of Instagram and Tiktok “Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious,” Wilde wrote in a visitors book while a student at Oxford. It proved more than the bravado of youth: fame he wanted and fame he got, and over a century later we’re still talking about him.
This year in particular would have been sure to garner Mr Wilde’s approval. Not only are productions of his works still plentiful, they are also, crucially, still fashionable. Ncuti Gatwa, who debuted as Doctor Who’s fifteenth Doctor last month, will lead a production of Wilde’s 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest at the National Theatre in November, while Succession star Sarah Snook took to the West End this summer to near-universal acclaim in a one-woman production of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Having picked up two Olivier awards, the show, directed by Kip Williams, is now set for a 2025 run on Broadway, with a film also in the works after the rights were recently snagged by Cate Blanchett. Such long-standing reverence for a writer is not novel, but there is something special about our enduring attachment to Oscar Wilde. When we think about Dickens or Austen or Shakespeare, it’s rare we remember details about the writer themselves; we might think of Scrooge, or Mr Darcy, or Hamlet.
But when we think of Oscar Wilde, we think of him: velvet-draped, ca.
