Review by Rita Severi (University of Verona)
Gareth Armstrong (2020), Wilde Without the Boy, con la registrazione audio di Gerard Logan, trad. italiana di Riccardo Cassarino, Daniele Gaggianesi e Maggie Rose, Milano, Ledizioni (Collana: Teatro Interculturale – Intercultural Theatre).
The book under review contains the English original and the Italian version of Wilde Without the Boy, written by Gareth Armstrong in 2011 and performed in the United Kingdom by Gerard Logan in 2014. The stage scenario was composed by choosing the most relevant paragraphs from the famous letter, entitled De Profundis by Robert Ross, dated January-March 1897, that Wilde sent to Douglas from his cell in the prison of Reading. The performance begins with a hint at Wilde’s last trial before going to prison and ends with a recital of the complete Ballad of Reading Gaol. Although both were begun in prison, the poem was actually completed by Oscar Wilde in Naples, where he was joined by his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, nicknamed Bosie. Besides the translation by Riccardo Cassarino and Maggie Rose, the book contains a second Italian translation of The Ballad by the poet Daniele Gaggianesi, who specialises in poetry in the Milanese dialect.
As Yeats famously said “All that’s beautiful drifts away”, and nothing could be more true considering Oscar Wilde, who falls in love with the young Douglas, a student at Oxford, who constantly slipped from his grasp, like a writhing eel. Oscar was a strong but also fragile man, already a recognizable literary figure, who would often appear as the very soul of the party of many aristocratic and high middle-class houses of London and salons of Paris – but also of other, more secretive places where lustful pleasures were freely practiced. The love between Bosie and Oscar will be fatal to both in different ways. Oscar submitted to two years of imprisonment of forced hard labour for “gross indecency”. His books were withdrawn from bookshops, the curtain fell on his plays, his goods were sold at auction, his children were taken away from him, and his wife had to flee the country. The poet was publicly humiliated, psychologically and socially destroyed, alienated from society, an outcast, completely ruined. All this sorrow for the love of another man made him also Christ-like, a form of being that Wilde deeply meditated and narrated in some of his Parisian apologues or parables. You can chastise the flesh but not the spirit. Bosie escaped imprisonment, but he also escaped from his own conscience, and would later on in his life repudiate the very man who had in every way believed in him as “the golden boy”, poet and writer.
Oscar Wilde wrote what is probably the longest letter in history, addressed to his “boy” lover, Bosie, in which he recalls the stages of their affaire: he narrates their meetings, attacks his lover, points out his own mistakes, sums up, advises, regrets, grieves, tries to forgive himself in what is at times an “apologia of love”, that wants to treasure everything that happened but at the same time wants to destroy everything, because of the unbearable suffering that was the fruit of a relationship not sanctioned by society.
These pages of literature and humanity, poetry and propaganda, which were only made truly public in full when the first edition of Wilde’s letters was published in 1962, inspire Wilde Without the Boy, which is a stage abridgement and adaptation of the undoubtedly dramatic De Profundis, the almost 100-page epistle, “in carcere et vinculis” that has been performed in Italy, drawing audiences and success, in different ways, in different theatres, with different aims in the last decade or more.
In 2020, in collaboration with the Florence Queer Festival, Dimitri Milopulos adapted the text with the title, Dal profondo del mio cuore/From the depth of my heart, and directed the actor Annibale Pavone in the dramatic recital, accompanied by music, at the Teatro della Limonaia in Sesto Fiorentino. In 2016 Antonio Nobili with a full cast of actors adapted De Profundis to invent a play on the life and great love of Oscar Wilde, which enjoyed a full season in Rome at the Teatro Furio Camillo. Before him, Claudio Marconi adapted and acted in his own rendition of De Profundis at the Teatro Ariosto in Reggio Emilia, after a trial performance at the Teatro Arsenale in Milan, in 2012. Perhaps the most interesting experiment involving Wilde’s original letter was the recital by Umberto Orsini with the collaboration on stage of the songwriter and composer, Giovanna Marini, who played her musical rendition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, both directed by Elio de Capitani in 2011, the year in which Masolino d’Amico signed the adaptation of De Profundis for the play directed by Riccardo Massai, at the Teatro Instabile Miela, in Trieste. D’Amico had originally translated and adapted the epistle for the stage performance of Paolo Bonacelli, directed by Riccardo Massai, at the Spoleto Festival of 2009.
In Wilde Without the Boy the Italian editors have successfully produced a bilingual text, highlighted by the music of Simon Slater, which offers a good example of intercultural theatre, clearly explained by Maggie Rose in her Preface, a choice of translations of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, one by Cassarino and Rose, the other by Gaggianesi that are semantically correct but, unfortunately (as often happens in the translation of poetry) do not respect the rhythmic/musical form of the poem, which is so important in a recital or in a song. So far it seems that only Vinicio Capossela (in “Ballate per uomini e bestie”, 2019) can sing the ballad, respecting its original music and meaning.
Riccardo Cassarino and Maggie Rose are extremely precise in their translation of the main text, taken from De Profundis, choosing to select their words carefully and measuring their sentences as if they were to overlap the original writing. Explanatory and philological notes have also been provided in a book that can be easily read by Wilde fans as well as high school/university students. The book is just the right size and price for any pocket and has been rationally and aesthetically planned and printed from front to back cover.