Its 400-seat roundhouse theatre located in Brisbane is a far cry from the classic stage of the Haymarket where Wilde’s play was first staged. La Boite will celebrate its centenary in 2025, as Australia’s oldest continuous theatre company. Now, La Boite Theatre is staging a remarkably free adaptation of An Ideal Husband. The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily.
But as Wilde observed in The Importance of Being Earnest: The ending veers on the saccharine, when Lady Chiltern proclaims she feels “love, and only love” for her ideal husband. It is a complex play, an odd mixture of sentimentality and satire, without the consistency of the far more polished The Importance of Being Earnest. The play was written while Wilde was besotted with Queensberry’s son, Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas) and the very title is ironic: Wilde, it turned out, was far from “the ideal husband”. Less than two months later Lord Queenberry left his infamous card accusing Wilde of “posing as a sodomite”, which led to Wilde suing for criminal libel – and then being arrested and imprisoned. Review: An Ideal Husband, directed by Bridget BoyleĪn Ideal Husband was first performed in January 1895.
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