Take a walk on the Wilde side

Listeners to RTE Radio 1 are in for a treat next month when the writings of Oscar Wilde are broadcast over a period of three …

Listeners to RTE Radio 1 are in for a treat next month when the writings of Oscar Wilde are broadcast over a period of three weeks. The "Oscar Wilde Season" has been organised to commemorate the centenary of the writer's death. It will include six plays, five children's stories, five guest lectures, one novel and three works written during the years he was in prison.

Many of the 71 actors who are here to share in the celebrations - such as Jeananne Crowley, Des Cave, Derek Chap- man and Malcolm Douglas.

The writer's grandson, Merlin Holland, who says his resemblance to his grandfather is more "the triumph of imagination over history", is here, chatting to Prof Davis Coakley, author of Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Irish, which was published in 1995. Producer of the series, Kate Minogue, a Kilkenny woman who was educated in Ferrybank (a Waterford connection is always significant) says "the plays are full of fun and reality. And there's a heart-wrenching quality in them." What amazes her about Wilde is that "he was able to be so positive in spite of all his suffering".

Holland, says he has "mixed feelings" about the RTE Season because "it's the establishment taking him to their bosom; on the other hand Oscar, being the self-publicist that he was, would be delighted". His work as editor with Rupert Hart-Davis, of The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, which will be coming out early in November, has just finished. Getting so close to his grandfather's life and sufferings, he says, "I thought that I was immune to any sense of real emotion" but "going through the last three years of his life in Paris was very distressing".

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Gerald Dawe, poet and director of the Oscar Wilde Centre at Trinity College Dublin, says there will be a conference there in early December "with a fairly elaborate programme" on the Wilde legacy. The spirit of Wilde moves through the Wellington Room of the Merrion Hotel as the guests talk and marvel at his genius. "I think Oscar Wilde was made for radio," says actor Susan Fitzgerald. "We're astonished at how easily his words make the transfer."

As talk about the great man, his genius and his tragedy continues, the ghost of Wilde seems to drift in to the hotel, which is only up around the corner from his birthplace on 21 Westland Row. The programmes will run from Tuesday, November 21st to Sunday, December 10th.