Jens Harzer leads searing De Profundis at the Coronet — SkimNews
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- Jens Harzer performs Oscar Wilde's "De Profundis" as a monologue at the Coronet theatre in London, staged by the Berliner Ensemble in German with English surtitles and running until 7 October
- Oliver Reese directs the interval-free production, which runs just 10 minutes short of two hours and is praised for avoiding feeling "over-wrought or leaden" despite its bleak subject matter
- The staging frames Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie") as an "anti-muse" — a grasping, sybaritic parasite whose company "sucked the creative life out" of the imprisoned Wilde
- Harzer delivers the monologue with "righteous rage," alternating between spitting or shouting certain lines and speaking others with "numbed forbearance," with intermittent shafts of lingering love and memories of past literary glory
- Hansjörg Hartung's lugubrious black set, Jörg Gollasch's plangent or flighty musical compositions, and Steffen Heinke's lighting create a "Beckettian" opening in which only Harzer's face is initially illuminated, suggesting a man speaking from his grave
Why it matters: The revival matters because it stages one of the bleakest works in the Wilde canon — a prison letter railing against the lover Wilde blamed for his downfall — through a performance the reviewer finds gripping rather than overwrought. London theatregoers have only until 7 October to see Harzer's acclaimed physicality channel Wilde at full-throttle despair.
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