Ireland remains a leading light for progress at a time when hate crimes are rising across much of Europe and leaders on both sides of the Atlantic are weaponising LGBTQ+ rights, British actor Simon Callow said as he attended the unveiling of a bust of Irish playwright Oscar Wilde.
The referendum in 2015 was a “wonderful thing” that was “recognised around the world”, he said, because it was “so unequivocal”.
Callow was among several dozen guests invited to the Irish embassy in Paris for the unveiling of a bronze bust of Oscar Wilde, commissioned to mark the 125th anniversary of his death. “Ireland is regarded as a very progressive place, and this (the artwork) is very much a manifestation of that,” he said.
Created by Czech artist Marie Šeborová, the Wilde bust was commissioned by Paris-based former barrister Bill Shipsey, founder of the Art for Human Rights movement.
READ MORE
Callow, who attended the event with his husband, Sebastian Fox, admits that he has been “fascinated” by the Irish dramatist “since boyhood”. Callow has written a biography of Wilde and in 2018, performed in the Frank McGuinness stage adaptation of De Profundis, the posthumously published letter written by the playwright from his prison cell to his former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. He was sentenced to two years’ hard labour in May 1895, after being convicted of “gross indecency”.
“It’s an overused word,” Callow said, “but Oscar Wilde was a sort of martyr for his sexuality. Although, in fact, his being put in prison set back the cause of gay liberation, because everyone was terrified of the consequences of being gay. But, nonetheless, he was the most articulate and prominent gay man to have been punished in Britain. I’ve always been drawn to him.”
Merlin Holland, a grandson of Oscar Wilde, maintained that the dramatist “never stood for anything except the human spirit”.
“I think he would be delighted to be held up as a gay icon, but what he wouldn’t want is to be chained up on a pedestal by the gay movement saying ‘you are ours, go away everyone else’,” he said. “I think he would be very happy that his misfortune, if we were to put it like that, has been of use to another generation, but (his legacy is) not just that.
“The thing about Oscar Wilde is that it’s never either/or. It’s always both/and. He was Protestant and Catholic, Irish and English. He was homosexual, but married with two children. It’s that combination of two sides which one always has to recognise.
“I suppose, in a sense, that’s exactly what the bust is saying. It represents the aesthete and slightly dandified Wilde, but it’s also the intellectual, the man of letters.”
Holland believes that his grandfather continues to appeal to new audiences, and particularly younger generations, more than a century after his death because of “his sensuality, his rebellion against the system, his integrity for standing up for what he believed in, come what may, and for his individuality in a time of total conformity”.
Although one of the most popular and influential literary figures in London in the early 1890s, Wilde spent his final years in Paris, where he died impoverished and in voluntary exile at the age of 46.
“He was a social pariah,” said Callow. “He was absolutely destroyed by his incarceration, by the fact of being a gay man. His last few years were very, very difficult.
“Very few people wanted to be seen with Oscar Wilde, so it’s wonderful that here, now, with this bust, he is finally being honoured.”
[ Oscar Wilde’s British Library reading pass reissued 130 years after confiscationOpens in new window ]
