Rue des Beaux-Arts n ° 77- Octobre-Novembre- Décembre 2021
Joan Schenkar , who as a playwright has an ear for a telling phrase , and as a history graduate has a taste for the recreation of period flavour , explains she planted sentences like these to indulge her enthusiasm for sharing Dolly Wilde ' s own zest for life ; just as she occasionally reminds the reader ( and the interviewer ) that she does understand critical theory and gender discourse , but knows when not to use them . She sees herself as more a composer than a biographer in the strict sense , a composer upon whom chance or fate has laid the task reclaiming Dolly Wilde from the shadows .
Such playfulness also derives from her subject ' s own ambiguities . Dolly lived life to the full , but had a destructive urge ( four suicide attempts , and her death from drugs perhaps deliberate ). She was proud of being Irish , but - unless her schooling was in Ireland ( it is not certain where she was sent to board ) - does not seem to have visited the country . She acquired an Irish accent as her uncle shed one ; and she was Oscaria Wilde whose company was unsought by Shaw or Beerbohm , by Robert Sherard or even Richard Le Gallienne , also living in Paris and writing on a desk he bought from Oscar ' s room in the Hotel d ' Alsace .
Recreating the world of Dolly Wilde , Joan Schenkar does not , however , allow her enthusiasm to outrun her judgment . The Bright Young Things seem a little tarnished now , and at the time they were more hedonistic , less creative , than their predecessors , dubbed by Ms Schenkar as " the children of Walter Pater and Sappho ".
Since the Roaring Twenties are now undergoing one of their periodic revivals ( we are perhaps a little weary of the fin-desiecle ), it has
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