The Pictures of Simon Gray: Dramatizing Degeneration

The Pictures of Simon Gray: Dramatizing Degeneration ANNE NOTHOF In the process of surviving thefin de vingtieme siecle, British theatre fe-enacts both literally and metaphorically the end of the nineteenth century, finding in the witty disillusionment of Oscar Wilde a way of seeing present reflections of failed humanism and modernism. The erosion of spiritual values finds expression in porttaits of debauched idealism and self-loathing. Dorian Gray's picture comes down from the attic and inhabits the drawing room. That Wilde's life is more the object of scrutiny than the plays he wrote is also a reflection of a contemporary compulsion to investigate the relationship of life and art - an inquiry into biography as self-portrait. David Hare's The Judas Kiss opened at the Playhouse Theatre in London in I998, produced by the Almeida Company , and transferred to New York, with Liarn Neeson as Wilde;' Moises Kaufman's Gross Indecency: The Three Trials a/Oscar Wilde opened in I997 in New York (and concurrently in San Francisco), directed by Kaufman at the Greenwich House Theatre, and was produced during the summer of 1998 in Toronto at the Canadian Stage Company's Berkeley Street Theatre, again directed by Kaufman; and Wilde, the movie, stalling Stephen Fry, was released in 1997.' The mordant comedies of Simon Gray are in many respects also portraits of the artist as disillusioned idealist, fashioned from the detritus of an eroded humanist tradition, the "fragments ... shored against [the] ruins."3 Gray's university education at Cambridge was in the "great traditionH of F.R. Leavis and T.S. Eliot; he absorbed the notion of culture as a system of values that could and should inform individual choices and actions, words and deeds. According to Leavis, "[this way of thinking] assumes enormously that - no one will deny it - as material conditions count - there is a certain measure of spiritual autonomy in human affairs, and that human intelligence, choice and will do really and effectively operate, expressing an inherent human nature."4 In Gray's novels, plays, and films, however, these coherent humanist values, Modern Drama, 43: I (Spring 2000) 56 Simon Gray 57 whether they exist only as a nostalgic imaginative construct or as an impossible dream. are shattered through violent acts or undermined by personal and social dissolution. The protagonists of Gray's plays are variant self-portraits that contain his own contradictions and the contradictions of the fin de siec/e; they are witty. literate. and clever. but fundamentally self-destructive and self-loathing. They indulge their sensuality as a way of asserting their aliveness . while their integrity and self-respect decay. Gray has absorbed much of the aphoristic philosophy of Oscar Wilde and his style of witty repartee. He also shares Wilde's propensity for a very public self-portraiture: as glosses on two of his plays. The Common Pursuit (1984) and Cell Mates (1995). he has written diaries of their construction and deconstruction in performance. In An Unnatural Pursuit (a diary of the London production of The Common Pursuit). How's That for Telling'Em; Fat Lady? (a diary of the New York production of The Common Pursuit). and Fat Chance (a diary of the production of Cell Mates). he dramatizes himself both as the lonely artist-martyr and as a self-destructive fraud. driven to excesses of smoking and drinking by the frustrations of his art and his life: Went to bed depressed and couldn'1 sleep, my mind busily melding together the injustices of Suite 506 with the inadequacies of Scene One as Inursed whiskies, smoked cigareltes - right back [0 the old habits, which of course depressed me further . At onc point Igot up and lay on the sofa beside my bags. brooding drunkenly, the room full ofsmoke, my lungs full of smoke, on suchlarge questions as "Whither ]1" and "When.?"S In Fat Chance. Gray's virulent account of the desertion of Stephen Fry from the lead role in Cell Mates in 1995. his self-portrayal vacillates between martyr and satyr. Following a nervous breakdown. he sees himself in the mirror of the rehearsal room in terms of Dorian Gray's portrait: There were enormous mirrors at the...