When Lady Windermere’s Fan premiered on stage at the St. James’ Theatre in London on February 20th, 1892, the newspapers proclaimed that “Mr. Oscar Wilde is nothing unless brilliant and witty.” The tangled complexities of the plot of this enjoyably unlikely social satire of a wife who suspects her husband of having an affair with surprising consequences (we won’t spoil the surprise!) are rivaled only by Wilde’s sparkling and witty dialogue. Despite its sharp one-liners, there is more to Lady Windermere’s Fan than mere entertainment; it is above all a subtle work that deftly balances comedy and seriousness, particularly pointed at the hypocrisy of Victorian attitudes to women and sex.

Join in the garden of the historic Forbes House Museum for this very special opportunity as Theater in the Open performs Lady Windermere’s Fan and see why one of its dashing characters, Lord Darlington, famously declares, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”