SOURCE: “Theatrical Inaction,” in New Statesman, March 27, 1998, p. 43.

In the following review, Kellaway offers a favorable valuation of The Judas Kiss.

David Hare’s superb new play The Judas Kiss is about love that disdains reason. Oscar Wilde must have known, on some level, that Lord Alfred Douglas—Bosie—was unkind, self-pitying and talentless. So why did he persist with his abject love? Was Wilde heroic or cussed? And what was it, exactly, that he found to love in Bosie? Beauty seems—in Hare’s imagined version—to have been only part of the answer.

The first act of The Judas Kiss takes place in 1895 in a bedroom in the Cadogan Hotel in London on the day of Wilde’s arrest. Bob Crowley’s set is ravishing; he has excelled himself with a room of pale green silk, printed with faded dragons and furnished with elegant gilded tables...