Oscar Wilde, Elizabeth Robins, and the Theatre of the Future

Oscar Wilde, Elizabeth Robins, and the Theatre of the Future KERRY POWELL The story of Oscar Wilde's friendship with the Ibsen actress and theatrical reformer Elizabeth Robins occupies a few paragraphs in many biographies of Wilde, that is, for at this writing there have been no biographies of Robins, although at least two are in the works.I Richard Ellmann's account of their relationship is typical, portraying Wilde as a wise mentor to the young actress newly arrived from Boston in 1888 with hopes of success on the London stage. "His practical advice," Ellmann writes, "was that she should give a matinee performance, and he promised to speak to Beerbohm Tree about her." Robins would always regard Wilde, he adds, "as her benevolent pilot through theatrical shoals.,,2 But Wilde's "practical advice" that Robins give a matinee performance at the Haymarket to launch her career in London ignored her poverty and the hundreds of pounds a matinee would cost her. Introducing Robins to Beerbohm Tree, he produced great hopes that ended in disappointment - nothing more than an understudy's role and Robins's dawning realization that Tree himself represented what she wanted to change in the Victorian theatre. Warning her away from a part in a play called A Fair Bigamist, Wilde damped her enthusiasm for a woman-centered play written by a woman playwright, a production of the kind that would become the mission of Robins's professional life. Finally, EHmann's claim that Wilde was her "benevolent pilot through theatrical shoals" conceals the more complicated truth - not only that he steered her onto those shoals instead of through them, but that in the end Robins sought to become Wilde's pilot to what she thought of as the Theatre of the Future. Published accounts of the Wilde-Robins friendship focus on the first year or two of Robins's life in London - 1888 and 1889 - and sometimes mention Wilde's admiration for her epoch-making production of Hedda Gabler in 1891. But the unpublished papers of Robins in the Fales Library of New York Modern Drama, 37 (I994) 220 The Theatre of the Future 221 University - her diaries, a memoir of Wilde, and a novel of the theatre, in particular - make clear that their relationship did not end in 1889 but continued until near the time of Wilde's arrest, although gradually reordering itself round what Robins came to see as a struggle for control of the London theatre. For her the theatre represented "an enormous Power," uniting all the arts to "colour Politics" on one level while purging individual souls "by Pity and Fear" on another. For women in particular the theatre provided a doorway of escape from "the plate glass window of her prison," to use a metaphor of George Moore that Robins quoted approvingly} But she gradually came to realize, as she writes in Theatre and Friendship, how illusory was the "freedom " that the theatre provided women: how freedom in the practice of our art, how the bare opportunity to practise it at all, depended, for the actress, on considerations humiliatingly different from those that confronted the actor. The stage career of an actress was inextricably involved in the fact that she was a woman and that those who were masters of the theatre were men.4 The sUbjection of women - of actresses, especially, in Robins's analysis - prevented Victorian theatre from realizing its "enormous Power" and potential as a "Sacred Art." Her remedy was to do away with the autocracy of the theatre as an institution and replace it with a voluntary and cooperative association of workers, freed from a repression founded on masculine dominance and Darwinian economics. She thus inaugurated a feminist criticism of Victorian theatre , and it was Wilde's relationship to it that became the crux of his friendship with Elizabeth Robins in the 1890s. In an unpublished memoir of Wilde, however, Robins reflects on the period of their first acquaintance in a manner that encourages a different and more modest conclusion - the familiar one that she was simply the beneficiary of Wilde's theatrical wisdom and good nature: He was then at the height of his powers...