Rupert Everett: A Dead-On Oscar Wilde
David Hare’s play “The Judas Kiss,” about Oscar Wilde, is at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through June 12. It stars Rupert Everett as Wilde, and for the actor it is indeed the role of a lifetime. He gets himself up as the big, jowly Oscar of the later portraits. For most of the second act, Everett sits, in exile in Naples, and delivers zingers ex cathedra. He is less a Pope, however, than a self-identified Christ figure. You alternately cheer his puncturing of hypocrisy and roll your eyes at his accepted victimhood. I’m still not a fan of the play itself — Lord Alfred Douglas is an insufferable twit — but this production, directed by Neil Armfield, is stronger than the one with Liam Neeson in 1998. Everett’s performance makes it unmissable.
