by OSCAR WILDE
AN IDEAL HUSBAND was first produced at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in 1895, with Mr. Lewis Waller in the part of Sir Robert Chiltern , Miss Julia Neilson as Lady Chiltern, and Mr. Charles Hawtrey as Viscount Goring , at a period when its author's star was at its brightest, and nothing ruffled the late-Victorian serenity of a brilliant first-night at the home of English comedy. Life then, on and off the stage, had a measured cadence, and there was time to deliver an epigram and wait with agreeable certainty for the laugh. But time and the microphone have altered all that. In its adapted form for broadcasting, Oscar Wilde 's play stands or falls upon its own merits, unsupported by the red and gold of its original frame and, necessarily, by much dialogue that is not strictly relevant to the plot. An Ideal Husband is set in a world of public affairs, carried on with some pomposity by ' rising young ' and ' distinguished old ' statesmen, and in a no less exalted world of Society, inhabited by ' beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics.' With this once fashionable setting, and deprived of the charm its period offers to the eye, the play still holds by its stylish presentation of intrigue in high quarters, of reputation delicately balanced against integrity, of the beautiful bad woman from the past, and. above all, by its always acceptable implication that there can be no ' ideal husband ' without the perfect wife.
Against a fitting background of Mozart, the play, with its four-square plot, measured dialogue, and clear black and white moral issues, has an agreeable formality that more than compensates for its outmoded idiom. The producer has marshalled a distinguished east, including Miss Kyrle Bellew , well known as leading lady in many of the late Arthur Bourchier 's productions at the Strand Theatre, Miss Grizelda Hervey , and Mr. Leslie Perrins , that should give the best possible account of the sound theatrical virtues of this favourite of nearly forty years ago.