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You know, everything, I mean, somebody was just, now, as I was coming, was talking about,
you know, uh, that she'd lived in Paris, and said, well, of course, Oscar Wilde died there.
I said yes, and, you know, his best friend came and said, "Oscar, you're living beyond
your means," and he said, "No, I'm dying beyond my means," and then he looked around the room
and said, "I, I or that wallpaper has to go," and it was he who went, of course. Uh, even
on his deathbed, he was making people laugh. He was so courageous and so extraordinary,
and, of course, his last years were pitiful. I mean, he wrote 11 plays, most of them rubbish--um,
"Vera/The Nihilists," "The Duchess of Padua" are hopeless--and he's remembered, really,
for five plays: One, which he wrote also in French, "Salome," which he wrote for Sarah
Bernhardt, and it actually sounds better in French than it does in English, and the only
reason that "Salome" has lived is because it provided the Libretto for wonderful opera
by Richard Strauss. So, then there were four plays, and the first was "Lady Windermere's
Fan," an enormous success. Bernard Shaw always thought "Lady Windermere's Fan" was his best
play. Certainly, it's a very popular play, and when I did it here with, um, the incomparable
Dixie Carter, it was a massive sell-out, and then he followed that with "A Woman of No
Importance," another big play set in a country house in England with, with duchesses and
lords and so on, and then his third play, "An Ideal Husband," set in this grand house
with the most successful politician in England giving a great party, and then suddenly, there's
this last small play, which is the most brilliant, brilliant of them all, and it stands on a
peak of its own, "The Importance of Being Earnest," 'cause nobody's ever matched it,
nobody, and can, because there's not a word in it that is superfluous, it's, it's amazing,
it's like a jewel.