Oscar Wilde died on Nov 30, 1900, at the age of 46 (Photo by Napoleon Sarony, circa 1883) |
Over a century after the American
Revolutionary army made the Château Ramezay in Old Montreal its Canadian
headquarters in 1775 – Benjamin Franklin himself would later overnight there in
his quest to persuade Canadians to join the American Revolution – the Château’s
gardens (then already a fraction of the size they used to be) would be visited by none other than Oscar Wilde during Wilde’s lecture
tour of Canada
in 1882.
Don Anderson resurrects Wilde
|
In Wilde’s children’s story The Selfish Giant, originally published
in the collection The Happy Prince
and Other Tales in 1888, kids play in an orchard very much like the
gardens of Château Ramezay, which was built by Claude de Ramezay, the military
commander appointed Governor of Montreal in 1704.
Château Ramezay was dubbed "the most
beautiful house in Canada ,"
and its gardens and orchard – only 750 square metres remain today – sloped down
to the St-Lawrence
River .
When I first visited the garden a few year ago I could not help but think of Oscar and The
Selfish Giant, a story that can still bring me to tears today.
“The
Selfish Giant is the story I listened to most when I was a child and
when I read it today I can hear my father’s voice,” says Montreal actor Don
Anderson, who memorably portrayed Oscar in the Montreal New Classical Theatre
Festival production of critically-hailed American playwright Moises
Kaufman’s Gross Indecency: The Three
Trials of Oscar Wilde, back in November 2006.
“It’s a powerful story," Anderson continues.
"Like so many of Oscar’s stories, there is a moral underpinning. All of
what he wrote had a moral underpinning.”
Wilde, of course, really was the world’s
first gay icon, and later a gay martyr when he was tried and convicted of
sodomy in 1895, even though Oscar would never know what he would become, much
less recognize the word “gay.”