I refused immediately, not just because of my vow to keep out of the theatre but because I felt that the play was inextricably bound up with his unique personality. I wrote this piece about him and it for the Sunday Telegraph in 1997. To a remarkable degree, my adolescence was dominated by Oscar Wilde: I only ever spoke of him as ‘Oscar’. This was the man I wanted to be, generous, eloquent, intellectually brilliant, provocative, fun, and, of course, gay, though I kept rather quiet about that bit; this was, after all, 1963. When I was about fifteen I borrowed a couple of LPs from the record library, their sleeves exotically printed in gold and black, the title printed in curling Beardsleyesque letters: The Importance of Being Oscar. The title was irresistible, of course, to a thorough-going Wildean, the presentation exotic and promisingly decadent; even the actor/author’s name was fascinatingly foreign, not to say unpronounceable: Micheál mac Liammóir.
