Reviews for Whiting: Plays One

The average rating for Whiting: Plays One based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-10-27 00:00:00 Sten Beckman Reading an Oscar Wilde play is sort of like life being perfect. The structure of the work is faultless, the dialogue is uber-clever and fantastic. What's wrong with Wilde? Nothing. He's perfect. I can't imagine any writer who wrote so beautifully in his native language. There are some people who are born with 'it' and Wilde is one of them. Of course for someone so perfect he would have to get involved in some nasty social business via his decade. But when you look back at Wilde, one realizes that he is someone from the 19th Century who is saying goodbye to the Victorian era and culture. It's like he couldn't wait to jump into the 20th Century. Which makes it sad that we didn't accept Wilde with our open arms. We killed the thing that was so beautiful and right. Wilde was born in 1854 and died in 1900. I was born in 1954 and was convinced I would be dead by the year 2000 - just because of Wilde. It's silly and egotistic on my part, yet it also shows how much I love Wilde.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-08-03 00:00:00 Mickey Rymer We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Lady Windermere's Fan ~~ Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere's Fan is quite clever, quite witty, but at it's heart is a comedy in the vein of The Importance of Being Ernest. And while all is resolved in a neat package by the end of Act IV, it is not as satisfying most of Wilde's work. Lady Windermere's Fan is a social comedy, as is most of Wilde's work. It looks at the social norms, expectations and mannerisms of the time. And while it uses humor to criticize class situations, the humor is much more subtle than one would expect from Wilde. In his letters, Wilde claimed that he did not want the play to be viewed as "a mere question of pantomime and clowning"; he was interested in the piece as a psychological study. In this, Wilde has succeeded.