Lady Windermere's Fan

Oscar Wilde

Aug 2001 · L.A. Theatre Works · Narrated by Roger Rees and Full Cast

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1 hr 22 min

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About this audiobook

The irreverent satire that launched Wilde’s succession of classical comedies. A Lord, his wife, her admirer and an infamous blackmailer converge in this delicious comic feast of scandal. A divinely funny comedy of good girls, bad husbands and the moral hypocrisy of British high society in the late nineteenth century.

An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring:
Gina Field as Lady Agatha Carlisle
Judy Geeson as Lady Plymdale
Joanna Going as Lady Windermere
Arthur Hanket as Mr. Cecil Graham
Lisa Harrow as Mrs. Erlynne
Dominic Keating as Mr. Hopper
Miriam Margolyes as The Duchess of Berwick
Roger Rees as Lord Windermere
Eric Stoltz as Lord Darlington
James Warwick as Lord Augustus Lorton
Tom Wheatley as Parker

Directed by Michael Hackett. Recorded before a live audience at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

About the author

Flamboyant man-about-town, Oscar Wilde had a reputation that preceded him, especially in his early career. He was born to a middle-class Irish family (his father was a surgeon) and was trained as a scholarship boy at Trinity College, Dublin. He subsequently won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was heavily influenced by John Ruskin and Walter Pater, whose aestheticism was taken to its radical extreme in Wilde's work. By 1879 he was already known as a wit and a dandy; soon after, in fact, he was satirized in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience. Largely on the strength of his public persona, Wilde undertook a lecture tour to the United States in 1882, where he saw his play Vera open---unsuccessfully---in New York. His first published volume, Poems, which met with some degree of approbation, appeared at this time. In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd, the daughter of an Irish lawyer, and within two years they had two sons. During this period he wrote, among others, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), his only novel, which scandalized many readers and was widely denounced as immoral. Wilde simultaneously dismissed and encouraged such criticism with his statement in the preface, "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all." In 1891 Wilde published A House of Pomegranates, a collection of fantasy tales, and in 1892 gained commercial and critical success with his play, Lady Windermere's Fan He followed this comedy with A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and his most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). During this period he also wrote Salome, in French, but was unable to obtain a license for it in England. Performed in Paris in 1896, the play was translated and published in England in 1894 by Lord Alfred Douglas and was illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley. Lord Alfred was the son of the Marquess of Queensbury, who objected to his son's spending so much time with Wilde because of Wilde's flamboyant behavior and homosexual relationships. In 1895, after being publicly insulted by the marquess, Wilde brought an unsuccessful slander suit against the peer. The result of his inability to prove slander was his own trial on charges of sodomy, of which he was found guilty and sentenced to two years of hard labor. During his time in prison, he wrote a scathing rebuke to Lord Alfred, published in 1905 as De Profundis. In it he argues that his conduct was a result of his standing "in symbolic relations to the art and culture" of his time. After his release, Wilde left England for Paris, where he wrote what may be his most famous poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), drawn from his prison experiences. Among his other notable writing is The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891), which argues for individualism and freedom of artistic expression. There has been a revived interest in Wilde's work; among the best recent volumes are Richard Ellmann's, Oscar Wilde and Regenia Gagnier's Idylls of the Marketplace, two works that vary widely in their critical assumptions and approach to Wilde but that offer rich insights into his complex character. Roger Rees is a Welsh-born actor and director who became famnous on stage as Nicholas Nickleby and later played English multi-millionaire Robin Colcord on the TV Show "Cheers". He was an accomplished stage star who won Tony and Olivier Awards in 1982 for his role as the title character in the Royal Shakespeare Company's The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby. He was familiar to television audiences as Robin Colcord, a millionaire love interest for Rebecca Howe (Kirstie Alley) in 1980s comedy Cheers and more recently as British ambassador Lord John Marbury in cult US political drama The West Wing from 2000 to 2005. Among his other credits was an appearance as the Sheriff of Rottingham in Mel Brooks¿ slapstick comedy Robin Hood: Men in Tights in 1993. Roger Rees passed away in his home in New York on July 10, 2015. He was 71.

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