How
easily he read not only the lips of society but the rationale hidden in their
words, the cause for the effect and how beautifully he reverberates in his
witty words, the incomprehensible fillers we miss in the thoughts behind the mouthing
of the gaudy characters to submerge their ostentation and bring out the real
ugliness or the real goodness. How sharpened his skills were as an observer,
every character lying naked to the soul in his presence. He was a cynic who
understood the value of everything.
I
had read somewhere once, “If people saw in the mirror their true characters
rather than their images, there wouldn’t have been many mirrors left in the
world”.
This
short play undulates between trust, deceit and forgiveness. Mrs. Erlynne, out
of nowhere has pronounced her presence in the lives of Lord and Lady Windermere
and her bearing is having a catastrophic effect on their love and relationship.
Love, the overrated emotion has its own trying asks and one may spend his whole
lifetime just proving it. Who is this scandalous seductress who is so popular among
the men, where has she come from and why is she imposing herself on their lives,
what are her intentions?
We
all err, but only the one who gets caught is termed a thief, gets beaten up and
is scarred for life. Oscar Wilde drives home the point that even the best of
persons cannot be a Puritan in society for long, we all are misled sometimes
and we all shed our values sporadically for our situational conveniences, we
have to! It is a mental flaw to label someone as good or bad; even the worst of
people have done some goodness in their lives and the best of people have been
uglier. Patience is a virtue and to find goodness is another.
“We
are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”.
I had watched
the movie ‘A Good Woman’ featuring Helen Hunt and Scarlett Johansson and had liked
it immensely but didn’t know that it was based on this play, now I do!
Some witty
excerpts from the play:
“Lord
Darlington: Do you know I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in
this world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of
such extraordinary importance. It is absurd to divide people into good or bad.
They are either charming or tedious.”
**************************
“Cecil
Graham: Oh! Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip
made tedious by morality. Now, I never moralise. A man who moralises is usually
a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain.”
**************************
“Cecil
Graham: Now, my dear Tuppy, don’t be led astray into the paths of virtue.
Reformed, you would be perfectly tedious. That is the worst of women. They
always want one to be good. And if, we are good, when they meet us, they don’t
love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad, and to leave us
quite unattractively good.”
***************************
“Dumby: In
this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and
the other is getting it. The last is much the worst; the last is a real
tragedy!”
My Rating : * * * * * * * * * * -10/10
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| Oscar Wilde |
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