Wilde The Outsider

Oscar Wilde was never truly assimilated into London society and, shunned for his homosexuality after his release from prison, remained an outsider until his death. Initially, it was his Irishness that set him apart. His father was a distinguished Dublin surgeon and man of wide scientific interest, including natural history, ethnology and Irish antiquarian topography, who had been knighted by Queen Victoria, but when Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde moved to London, followed shortly by his widowed mother and his brother Willie, he found that many people in the city were uncomfortable with his non-Englishness, his flamboyant style and his willingness to challenge the status quo.

Lady Wilde was an enormous influence on Oscar, as producer Marc Samuelson attests: "She was a very flamboyant society figure who was also a major Irish revolutionary leader and a fairly significant poet as well, who used to write under the name of Speranza. After Sir William Wilde died she came to London in very straitened circumstances, but she and Oscar were incredibly close and she played a significant role in his life.

"In a sense she was overpowering; there's a great quote about Oscar and Bosie - 'the over-loved meets the under-loved' - and Oscar did have this incredibly powerful relationship with his mother. After he lost the libel case, a lot of his friends were telling him to flee the country. Speranza famously said 'if you stay, even if you go to prison, you will always be my son. But if you go, I will never speak to you again.'"

Julian Mitchell also acknowledges her importance to Oscar's story: "The real influences on his life are his mother, Bosie and Robbie Ross. Being Irish, being homosexual, at that period meant being an outsider, an observer of society - and, of course, he was a parvenu. One of the cruellest things Bosie used to say about him was that he's always writing about the upper classes, but doesn't really know what they're like. He uses them in the way that any artist does. He uses any available images of society and then says very interesting things about them."

Wilde's wit and social comment were also perceived as a threat by some in society, as Stephen Fry points out. "People are always suspicious that if something's funny it can't be true - the reverse is the case. In fact if something isn't funny it can't be true, because life is like that. He turned the whole picture upside down. In the microcosm of the epigram, his are often reversals of Victorian platitudes, like 'Work is the curse of the drinking classes' - which is absolutely true, but is the reversal of an extremely dull Victorian remark."

Julian Mitchell created the composite character of Lady Mount-Temple (named after a distant relative of Constance Wilde) "to represent the attitudes of society and to show how people felt threatened by Oscar - it wasn't just the Marquess of Queensberry. Society at large was very frightened by people coming out and saying things and they thought the Empire was under threat. And actually what they didn't realise was that the Empire was doomed anyway."