Staging Wilde's Society Plays: A Conversation with Philip Prowse (Glasgow Citizens Theatre)

Staging Wilde's Society Plays: A Conversation with Philip Prowse (Glasgow Citizens Theatre) JOEL H. KAPLAN Philip Prowse (b. 1937) is something of an anomaly in contemporary British theatre, a director who comes to his craft from a design rather than a performance background. Trained at London's Slade School of Art, Prowse worked briefly in the model rooms at Covent Garden before becoming stage designer at the Watford Palace in 1967. Two years later he moved on to the Glasgow Citizens Theatre, where he has continued to serve as part of the triumvirate (together with Giles Havergal and Robert David MacDonald) responsible for that company's artistic direction. Over the past two decades Prowse's aesthetic has come to dominate the Citizens, helping to make it unique among Britain's regional troupes, both in its European outlook and in its sumptuous, exuberant theatricality. Through the period Oscar Wilde has been a mainstay of the company's repertoire. In the 1970S Prowse twice designed Havergal's stagings of The Importance of Being Earnest, including a 1977 mounting of the play's four-act version. During the following decade he both directed and designed his own productions of all three of Wilde's society plays, A Woman of No Importance (1984), An Ideal Husband (1986), and Lady Windermere's Fan (1988), claiming to have found them "comedies" and left them "dramas." The accomplishment - regarded by critic Michael Coveney as "the glory of Prowse's work ... in the 1980s" has led the Guardian's Michael Billington to credit Prowse with "completely revis[ing] our notion of how to play early Oscar" (9 May 1988). In 1991 Prowse made his Royal Shakespeare Company debut with a new production of A Woman of No Importance. Much indebted to his Citizens' staging , it played to full houses at the Barbican, before transferring to the Haymarket for an extended West End run. The following interview was conModern Drama, 37 (1994) I92 PLATE 1. The gildedgarden at Hunstanton Close. Act I of Philip Prowse's 1984 Glasgow Citizens Theatre production of A Woman a/No Importance . Photo by John Vere Brown. 194 JOEL H. KAPLAN ducted in Prowse's London flat, shortly after the Glasgow opening of his 1993 adaptation of The Picture ofDorian Gray.* 8 March 1993 London Joel Kaplan: During the 1980s you directed and designed all three of Wilde's society comedies at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre: A Woman of No Importance in 1984, An Ideal Husband in 1986, and Lady Windermere's Fan in 1988. In 1991 you made your Royal Shakespeare Company debut with A Woman ofNo Importance, and have just opened your own adaptation of The Picture ofDorian Gray. I remember Benedict Nightingale referring to you in The Times a few years back as a "Wildoholic." What is it that keeps sending you back to Wilde? Philip Prowse: Well, he's good box office. He does very well. Which is why [with Peter Hall's An Ideal Husband and Nicholas Hytner's The Importance of Being Earnest] we're having something of a Wilde revival in the West End at the moment. Q: That may be true now. But it wasn't in 1984 when you decided to stage what must be the least accessible of Wilde's major plays, A Woman of No Importance, at the Citizens. A: The history of it is rather curious. I knew that the play of Wilde's that was never done - or if it was, was totally unsuccessful- was the Woman ofNo Importance. It was the one I found most interesting, the most ... radical. It also had the best story. At the end of Act I you wanted to know what would happen in Act II, and at the end of Act II you were desperate to know what would happen in Act III. That isn't entirely true of the others. So it was always on my list of things to do. When I staged it at Glasgow it was on an experimental basis. The business that it did was an absolute revelation. Later when I did the play for the Royal Shakespeare it was clearly a revelation to them too. They didn...