From Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan.
Do you know I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance.
I remembered this play as much better in performance. While reading last night I dozed off and dreamed a version that tread the line between absurdist and horror. Each time an actor delivered one of Wilde’s set-piece quips they stopped speaking and held their mouth open as a voice – the same every time – boomed from above ‘I can resist everything but temptation’ or ‘scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.’ That done, all actors resumed as normal until the next quip five seconds later.
Extracts 