![]() ![]() Nathaniel Parker plays Chiltern as a man aggressively unapologetic for his youthful ambition but faintly comic in his later adoption of a high moral tone. One of the play’s chief delights … Freddie and Edward Fox. Corruption, Wilde implies, is inescapable in a money-mad society. ![]() ![]() While Wilde doesn’t exonerate his hero, who is later blackmailed by the unscrupulous Mrs Cheveley, he allows Chiltern to defend his actions by saying: “Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons” – which in this case was the worship of wealth. Sir Robert Chiltern, a rising politician, is haunted by the fact that, as a young man, he sold state secrets for private profit. One key idea, as George Bernard Shaw understood in his 1895 review, is Wilde’s assertion of a robust individuality against a mechanical idealism. Jonathan Church’s stylish revival reminds us Wilde explores serious issues under the epigrammatic surface. R ailing against fashionable society’s overpopulation, one of Oscar Wilde’s aristocratic chatterboxes cries: “Really, someone should arrange a proper scheme of assisted emigration.” Although the line is devoid of racial overtones, it is one of many that strike home in this ever-topical play. ![]()
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