Wilde weekend to focus on Oscar’s lasting legacy

Arts Week with Judy Murphy – judymurphy@ctribune.ie

Playwright, poet and wit Oscar Wilde is the subject of a new festival kicking off in Galway city this weekend. The two-day event, taking place this Saturday and Sunday celebrates Wilde’s life and work and highlights his and his family’s strong links with the west of Ireland.

Wilde’s father, the celebrated surgeon, Sir William Wilde built a house near Cong, on the shores of Lough Corrib in the 1860s and wrote extensively about the area. As a young man, Oscar spent a great deal of time in the locality, fishing and boating on the lake with his siblings. Even after the family link with Moytura ended, he frequently returned to visit the Lough Corrib area.

As well as Wilde’s local links, this festival will present a performance of his poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol and will explore the writer’s sexuality in the context of his Irishness. It will conclude with a candlelit dinner theatre show at the Harbour Hotel.

The festival is the brainchild of Athenry woman Sandra Coffey, whose first introduction to Wilde was as a college student when she read his poem Requiescat. It was written for his sister Isola, who died in 1867, two months short of her tenth birthday. Wilde was very close to her and was left heartbroken by her death.

Sandra hopes that for lovers of Wilde, the festival will capture the essence of the man and his work, while it will be an introduction to those who are not familiar with his life and work.

The festival, which has been financially supported by the Gathering, has been welcomed by Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland.

It will be launched officially at 4pm this Saturday upstairs in Busker Browne’s. The launch will be followed by a talk from poet and biographer Gerard Hanberry on Wilde’s strong connections with Galway and the west of Ireland. Gerard’s 2011 book, More Lives Than One, The Remarkable Wilde Family Through The Generations received much praise for its fresh information on Oscar’s time in prison, his father’s cover up of his illegitimate daughters’ deaths and his mother’s dire poverty in the years before her death.

Gerard’s talk is free.

Later on Saturday evening acclaimed storyteller Rab Fulton, who recently released his book, Galway Bay Folk Tales will perform Wilde’s most famous and poignant poem,The Ballad of Reading Gaol. This poignant and powerful work is based on Wilde’s two-year imprisonment from 1895-97 and offers an insight into its impact on him. That starts at 8.30pm in the Town Hall Theatre. Tickets are €5 and are available from the Town Hall.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.