Oscar

Music by Joby Talbot

Choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon

Stage and Costume Design by Jean-Marc Puissant

Lighting by Mark Henderson

Projections by David Bergman

Costume Supervisor: Musette Molyneaux, Jenny Howard, Amelia Peace, Claire Cicala

Set and Costume Production: The Australian Ballet workshop 

Images © The Australian Ballet 

A full-length Ballet inspired by the life and work of Oscar Wilde, presented as a flash back from his high profile conviction, at London’s Old Bailey in 1895, and his prison cell at Reading Goal.

 

Act 1 weaves Oscar’s life and his fairytale The Nightingale and The Rose, drawing parallels between Oscar’s and the Nightingale’s self sacrifice, in the quest of authenticity and love.

Act 2, set in Oscar’s mind, locked in his tiny cell, stages a series of feverish nightmares. In a hellish spiral where Oscar’s relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, Bosie, the love of his life, finds echoes with characters and themes of his great novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

 

The scenography sets Act 1 within the faded grandeur of a Victorian music hall, transforming into Oscar’s family home, Tite House, or the fairytale world of The Nightingale and The Rose. 

The bourgeois’ grandeur of the space is stripped for Act 2, leaving a prison-like metal skeleton evoking the industrial revolution, set against a black void.

 

A mix of Victorian clothes and re-imagined baroque costumes support Act 1’s narrative. Fairytale characters’ costumes include oversized  textiles printing of Oscar’s manuscripts.

In Part 2, Oscar wears his prison uniform stamped with his cell number, C-3-3, throughout his interactions with memories of characters from his life, and characters from The Picture of Dorian Gray. It was crucial that the audience should differentiate these various categories of characters, populating the stage all at once, at first glance. Victorian costumes for the Dorian characters were overlaid with oversized stencils of Oscar’s manuscript of Dorian Gray; Memories characters wore replicas of their Act 1 costumes, made of photo-printed textiles of winter tree branches, a desolate echo of the lush foliage Act 1’s fairytale trees.

 

Video mapping and projections, created from design research and preparatory artworks, in collaboration with David Bergman, augment Fairytale, Dorian and Memory worlds. They also give us poignant glimpses of Oscar’s state of mind, his emotional, physical and existential decay, locked within the four walls of his tiny cell.