“Jens Harzer is extraordinary”
De Profundis can be read in a plethora of ways. It can be read as Oscar Wilde’s desperate love letter to Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas), his final profound reflection on art and literature, or even his “surrender” to Christianity.
With the text radically reduced and rearranged by Oliver Reese, Artistic Director of the Berliner Ensemble and director of this production, is it still possible to retain the varied dimensions of the book, as well as its essence?
To some extent, yes and no. While both journey through Wilde’s heartbreaking love for, and despair over Bosie, as well as his reckonings with art and artist, they present very different images of Wilde. Where the book presents a melancholy Wilde, wounded and nearly burnt out by love, trying to recover through Christ some new possibility for art, Jens Harzer gives us a Wilde who is possessed by love, furious, frantic and almost Faustian. For him, artistic transcendence seems only achievable through rage and self-destruction.
Without doubt, Harzer is exhilarating. Beyond reciting an almost two-hour-long text, his showcases extraordinary physicality. On a bare stage, confined within his tiny cell (designed by Hansjörg Hartung), which may also remind us of a confession box, he appears at once utterly frenetic while remarkably lucid. He performs Wilde as a real thinker in real time, thoughts occurring as fragments, his hand looping in the thin air, as if trying to grasp a trace of light. His voice is cracked and vulnerable, but we can almost envision the structure of his thought.
Steffen Heinke’s lighting somehow maps Wilde’s internal psyche, which is abrupt and sudden. One moment he is banging against the wall, the next he peacefully recounts his first meeting with Bosie’s father. This is, actually, a more convincing and truthful way of illustrating a collapsed man’s mentality. While this production cuts much of Wilde’s writing on Jesus Christ, Jörg Gollasch’s music, with its frequent use of the organ, retains hints of that spiritual dimension.
In a way, this production feels strikingly relevant in our own times both in its content and its presentation. In our modern world, atomised human bings, encaged in their physical or mental cells, are similarly yearning for love. Wilde’s behaviour onstage can also feel uncannily familiar for people living in alienated modern capitalism, whether it is dousing oneself with bottled water, biting oneself until they bleed, or screamingly helplessly into the void.
However, Wilde gives us signpost. Imagination. Not love, not faith, but imagination. Imagination becomes Wilde’s ultimate line of escape. He is resentful but he is not devoured by resentment or rage because imagination opens up new ways of valuation. That is why finally, at the end of the play, Harzer’s Wilde eventually climb out of his cell.