Oscar Wilde and Contemporary Irish Drama: Learning to be Oscar’s Contemporary by Graham Price (review)

Oscar Wilde is undoubtedly a literary figure of high standing, particularly in the area of dramatic production. That he should continue to exert an influence on contemporary Irish playwrights will not come as a surprise to many. However, what Graham Price achieves in this impressive monograph is to trace this influence on some of the best-known twentieth-century Irish playwrights: Marina Carr, Brian Friel, Thomas Kilroy, Frank McGuinness, and Tom Murphy. Such an undertaking is hugely ambitious, but then Price adds to his task by including a section on twenty-first-century writers Martin McDonagh and Mark O’Halloran, which was not a particularly judicious decision in the opinion of this reviewer.

The Introduction attempts to justify the choice of subject and begins with a discussion of the exclusion of Wilde from The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991) by the editors Seamus Deane and Christopher Murray on the premise that he was not really “an important Irish writer.” The irony of this position is not lost on Price, who detects a clear “trend towards Wildeanism” in Philadelphia, Here I Come!, arguably the best-known play by one of the founders of Field Day, Brian Friel. Price attributes some of the rehabilitation of Wilde as an Irish writer to the work of Declan Kiberd, who in one particular essay contended that Wilde’s “aesthetic of lying,” among other characteristics, “proved to be highly influential for colonial and postcolonial writers in Ireland in the twentieth century.” Kiberd also saw Wilde as a committed Irish nationalist, “whose work aims to deconstruct essentialist, British-inspired notions of Irish weakness and British strength.” Other notable features of Wilde’s dramaturgy according to Price include “a profound commitment to radicalism and subversion”; his vision of the role of the artist “as being focused on making the world rather than just imitating it in a realistic mode”; and his particular form of dandyism, which constitutes “an important precursor of the doctrine of camp.”

The major obstacle Price needed to overcome was to demonstrate a lineage from Wilde through five twentieth-century playwrights and right up to some practitioners associated more closely with the twenty-first century. Would this be achieved through intertextuality, tracing the “anxiety of influence,” the thematic choices, or stylistic similarities? The answer seems to be through a combination of all of these, a gargantuan undertaking. It may have been wiser for Price to concentrate on just two comparators, Friel and McGuinness, as these chapters are where the analysis is most surefooted. One has to admire the mountain of primary and secondary material he was required to read in order to cover such a large canvas. To his credit, he rises admirably to the challenge he sets himself and is clearly very knowledgeable about the eight writers he discusses. But the focus is not always as tight as it might be, and the result is an inevitable drop in intensity at various points. This unevenness may also be attributable to the fact that the Wildean influence is not always apparent, and one senses occasionally that the methodology has been retrofitted to suit the thesis that Price is anxious to prove.

The chapter on Frank McGuinness works well precisely because there is a shared fascination with “liminality and undecidability in relation to life, subjectivity and reality in general” in the work and lives of the two writers. Price attributes this in part to McGuinness’s Donegal roots. He quotes from an interview with Tony Roche in which McGuinness admitted: “I never found a sense of place an easy thing to grasp and I certainly never found it an easy thing to celebrate. I’m not at ease anywhere. But I have no doubt where I absolutely belong and where I come from, and that is Donegal.”

Price sees a real shared struggle in coming to terms with “home” in both writers. Wilde was someone who did not...