De Profundis review – Oscar Wilde brought alive with righteous rage

Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis really does belong to the depths. Written as a letter to his ex-lover after being jailed for homosexuality, it reflects soul-crushing torments.

Its adaptation into a monologue rarely gets an outing, perhaps because it is so bleak, but is staged by the Berliner Ensemble with heaps of extra angst for good measure.

It is dramatised with great anguished physicality by Jens Harzer and spoken in German with English surtitles. Only his face is lit up at first and the set-up looks Beckettian in its bare, black effects: Hansjörg Hartung’s lugubrious set design accompanied by Jörg Gollasch’s variously plangent or flighty musical compositions and Steffen Heinke’s well-crafted lighting. Harzer initially looks deathly, with a luminous outline around him suggesting a man speaking from his grave.

The letter opens with Wilde’s pet name for Lord Alfred Douglas – Bosie – but this production only speaks in direct, accusatory address to “you”. Bosie is decried as something of an anti-muse to the suffering artist – a grasping, sybaritic parasite whose company sucked the creative life out of Wilde.

Harzer does not overplay it or tip into melodrama but blasts the part with righteous rage. He spits or shouts some lines, speaks others with numbed forbearance. In between the anger are shafts of light: remnants of love for Bosie, flashes of his past celebrated glory as a writer. He cannot let himself be filled with hate, he says, yet this monologue is irredeemably bitter.

Under well-paced direction by Oliver Reese, it is remarkable that none of it feels over-wrought or leaden. It is essentially a static piece of narration but does not feel it here. Harzer is sometimes curled into himself, like Franz Kafka’s insect-like Gregor Samsa, and sometimes stretching his arms in the air in Christ-like surrender.

As an interval-free production just 10 minutes short of two hours, it is an accomplishment that a piece drenched in so much darkness is also so gripping in its illumination of an artist in full-throttle throes of despair.