A Wilde Fairytale

Christopher Wheeldon’s fascination with Oscar Wilde began when he was a young boy. A creative child with a rich imagination, Wheeldon was instantly drawn into the magical worlds Wilde drew so evocatively in his fairy tales. “As a kid I always loved fairy tales, of all sorts. It was early exposure to Alice in Wonderland that led me to make Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” says the award-winning choreographer. “Fantasy has always been something that [appealed], and I was always struck by the beauty, the vulnerability and the pain in Oscar’s fairy tales. I guess I noticed less of the pain when I was younger.”

As Wheeldon grew older, however, he began to appreciate the darker undertones behind much of the Irish author and satirist’s wit, be it the fairy tales in The Happy Prince and Other Tales or The Picture of Dorian Gray. Stephen Fry’s depiction of Wilde in the eponymous 1997 film only further piqued Wheeldon’s interest.

“I was fascinated by so many aspects of Oscar’s life portrayed in that film – the duality, the wit and brilliance and, in contrast to that, the Icarian story of flying too close to the sun. And then of course all the parallels to his life in his work. He’s written so much of his own desire and his own character traits into his work, even the fairy tales.”

When The Australian Ballet’s Artistic Director David Hallberg approached Wheeldon about creating a new full-length ballet on his dancers, Wheeldon didn’t hesitate. Not only had the idea of crafting a ballet about Wilde’s life – as told through Wilde’s own writing – captivated him for some time, Hallberg and Wheeldon agreed audiences were ready for a production that pushed their perceptions of what ballet could and should be. To find a character whose story sat outside the familiar tropes of Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake or The Sleeping Beauty.

“Being gay men we both have felt there’s been a lack of representation of gay stories in more traditional narrative ballet, for obvious reasons,” Wheeldon says. “We're entering a new era of open conversation around sexuality and of being allowed to be who we are and embracing our uniqueness. It felt like the right time to dive into this story.” It is astonishing to remind ourselves that Wilde was only 46 when he died. More than a century after his death in 1900, his remarkable body of work continues to be celebrated, influencing writers and attracting present-day audiences.

You don’t have to delve too far beneath the surface to see aspects of Wilde’s own life, fears and secret (or not-so-secret) desires revealed in his works. He often alluded to or exposed his own indiscretions in his writing. Wilde himself would end up in jail in 1895 after his relationship with British aristocrat Lord Alfred Douglas was exposed. At a time when homosexuality was deemed a criminal offence, Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. “There were all sorts of fascinating ingredients there,” Wheeldon says.

Wheeldon and his friend and musical collaborator, British composer Joby Talbot (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Winter’s Tale), retreated into the mountains of northern Italy, where they holed up together for three days to brainstorm Oscar in a quirky mountaintop chalet that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in a Wes Anderson film. “There was all this art everywhere, fabulous corners of bright acid green upholstered antique furniture, sprays of flowers and strange carved mermaid chandeliers. I think Oscar would have loved it,” says Wheeldon enthusiastically.

Following an hour-long Zoom call with actor and Oscar Wilde expert Stephen Fry, Talbot and Wheeldon established that the production’s basic structure would interweave Wilde’s own story with the relaying of two of his seminal semi-autobiographical works: The Nightingale and the Rose and The Picture of Dorian Gray. More a collage than straight linear narrative, Oscar moves between the literal and the poetic. “It’s a different way of working for me, this combination of traditional storytelling and slightly more biographical moments woven through the stories of Wilde. It’s not like Joby Talbot and I sat down with a play in front of us and said, ‘OK, we’re going to follow this structure.’ We’ve kind of had to build our own, which makes it a little bit more complicated.”

Although Wheeldon and Talbot had established the production’s outline, when Wheeldon stepped into the rehearsal room with The Australian Ballet’s dancers, he had choreographed very few, if any, actual steps. Wheeldon concedes this is a potentially anxiety-inducing process, but believes so strongly in the collaborative nature of creating dance, and the inspiration different dancers offer, that it’s a risk he’s prepared to take. “I create a structure but no steps, just plot points, emotional anchors within each scene, and then I just dive in with the dancers. I don’t prep a lot of material on myself. I’ve never been interested in being in the room making steps on my body because I’m not the one dancing them. Also, I was never terribly inspired by my own dancing,” he says with a laugh. “It’s a little bit fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, you’re relying on so many ingredients being right in the room, and it makes the creative process quite vulnerable. But it’s in this way that I’m creating for the dancers it’s being made on.”

Wheeldon has choreographed the character of Wilde on various dancers, including Jarryd Madden and Callum Linnane, but is quick to point out he involves all 76 dancers in the creative process.  “One of the nice things about The Australian Ballet is everyone is up and involved. They’re all in it and all working. There’s something very open and unprecious about Australian dancers.”

In a nod to Wilde’s precocious talent with words there are various references to writing sprinkled throughout Oscar, “It’s more about the spirit of Oscar’s style and wit [although] there are little moments where we suggest, through movement, the actual act of writing,” Wheeldon says.

Wheeldon began life as a classical ballet dancer, joining The Royal Ballet in 1991, before moving to New York City Ballet in 1993, where in 2001 he would be named their inaugural resident choreographer. In addition to founding his own company in 2007, Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company, today he is artistic associate of The Royal Ballet, where he created Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Winter’s Tale. He has created and staged productions for numerous international ballet companies, including the Paris Opera Ballet and the Bolshoi Ballet.

More recently Wheeldon has moved into the world of music theatre, directing and choreographing the Broadway musical adaptation of An American in Paris. In 2022, MJ the Musical, directed and choreographed by Wheeldon, debuted on Broadway, and won four Tony Awards, including Best Choreography.

Wheeldon’s flair for the music theatre genre was evident in the delightful, colourful, musical-inspired direction of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, while his unique choreographic voice was evident in An American in Paris. It is the merging of these two worlds, music theatre and ballet, that promises to make Oscar such a transportive, moving and entertaining night in the theatre. Nevertheless, it is Wilde’s own timeless and enduringly powerful writing that provides the backbone to Wheeldon’s latest work, and the key to unlocking the complex character that was the man himself. “For me it’s always really been the fairy tale itself that represents Oscar as a writer and also his ideas around love and the poetic pursuit of the ideal,” Wheeldon says. “It’s a complex subject matter, he wasn’t necessarily a figure you’d look at and associate with dance. But I think it’s exciting, I’m having a really good time.”

This article originally appeared in the 2024 Oscar souvenir program.