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IS   HE  

EARNEST   ?

From   the  Works,

Words  + Worlds 

of  Oscar  Wilde 

Be   yourself,

everyone   else   is already   taken ! 

 

Alfred or Algy?

Oscar or Jack?

Constance or Constant?

Earnest or Sodomite?

In a Town flexing from the 1890s to the 1980s, shit hits Windermere's fan, husbands aren't ideal, and there's nothing more important than just being. Let's hear it for the dearest of all boys as love dares to speak, as ballads are sung, as we hit Aunt Augusta's nightclub for some cucumber sandwiches and an acid house ball. But violent monsters lurk in the fog of Clapham Junction Station, the forces of legality and morality grind the green carnation underfoot, and the Eye of the Tiger lands on a Bloomsbury bookshop that had the courage to be proud. And for better or worse, as the seductive immortalisation of art reflects, preserves and distorts, one novel about the power of pleasure pervades and transcends it all, the cheeky bugger. 

Be yourself, everyone else is already taken! Easier said than done, old fruit. 

 

Drawn from Oscar Wilde's own plays, poems, trial transcripts, letters and singular novel, as well as the social and cultural world of 1980s London, GOLEM! bring you a staged reading of this very new and very queer cocktail of fact and fiction: David Fairs' Is He Earnest? - a prophetic, historic and fantastic dream… until it isn't.

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