After the Ball

Still, the two men eventually had much in common. As homosexual dramatists and relatively outside the upper-class -- Wilde an Irishman and Coward decidedly middle-class -- they delighted in giving English society the raspberry whenever the opportunity presented itself (or whenever they created the opportunity). Both could have claimed "shock" for a middle name, yet both could also insist on being recognized as moralists. It's tempting to wonder what ideas they might have exchanged, what gossip they might have shared if they'd been able to chat as Steve Allen had personages from different historical periods gab throughout his PBS series Meeting of Minds.

Since they didn't, anyone musing on what might have happened at such a confrontation has one place to turn: After the Ball, Coward's 1954 musical adaptation of Lady Windermere's Fan, Wilde's play about wronged women. Tony Walton has now directed and designed the musical for the Irish Repertory Theatre, with mildly charming results. From some angles, it's inevitable that Wilde and Coward would somehow encounter one another, but from another angle, it sounds a terrible idea. By the 1950s, Coward -- who jolted the London stage in the '20s and delighted audiences through the '40s -- was looking like shopworn goods.

In the same year that After the Ball waltzed across the stage, Kenneth Tynan was commenting, "We need plays about cabmen and demi-gods, plays about warriors, politicians, grocers. I counsel aggression because, as a critic, I had rather be a war correspondent than a necrologist." Coward couldn't have been less in synch with Tynan. He was confiding to his diary, "[W]hether I like it or not, it is perfectly possible that I am out of touch with the times. I don't care for the present trends in literature or the theatre."

So while in 1954 Tynan was avoiding "necrologist" duties, Coward was taking them on. He dusted off Lady Windermere's Fan because, one can only assume, he was determined to restore whatever retrospective glamour could be restored to tried-and-true theater pieces. He took on Wilde despite once having said that he wasn't fond of the epigram school of writing. "To me," he stated in an obvious jibe at Wilde and his contemporaries, "the essence of good comedy writing is that perfectly ordinary phrases such as 'Just fancy!' should, by virtue of their context, achieve greater laughs than the most literate epigrams."

It's almost as if he perversely attempted to prove his point in After the Ball, which weathered a respectable 188-performance run in London but added nothing to Coward's acclaim. Trimming the Wilde script in order to fit in songs, Coward nevertheless kept many of the deathless epigrams intact, such as the often quoted "I can resist anything except temptation." But in this text, edited by Barry Day (who also contributed additional material), the clever talk registers as tame in a way that neither Wilde nor Coward were in their heydays. Put another way, Wilde's comedy of manners is far too mannerly here.