Edinburgh Fringe 2026
A Forgotten Woman: Mrs Oscar Wilde
Slade Wolfe Enterprises Limited
Genre: Historical, Solo Performance, Theatre
Venue: TheSpaceUK
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Constance Lloyd is rarely remembered in literary history, overshadowed by her infamous husband. Feminist, writer and mother, her life is told through letter excerpts written in her own hand, revealing wit to rival Oscar’s, with dry humour and fierce selfhood. From a troubled childhood to society womanhood and quiet tragedy, this solo show restores a voice history diminished, inviting audiences into her life.
Review
A Forgotten Woman: Mrs Oscar Wilde is a solo show written and performed by Lexi Wolfe.
Constance Lloyd met Oscar Wilde through her brother Otto, and was charmed by his wit, in awe of his intelligence, captivated by his charisma – tall, handsome, unconventional in dress and famously long hair. It was a slow courtship, unfolding over several years, including a year long separation while he was in America. Oscar too expressed a profound early attachment, telling her he felt incomplete without her. Their early married years were happy and productive: a home in London furnished in the newer, simpler style, two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, and an active life within the aesthetic movement and its social reforms. Wilde encouraged Constance in her own writing, and she published a book of fairy tales for children as well as articles for women’s magazines.
The show is simply staged, just a writing desk and a chair – fittingly, very much the aesthetic style Constance later adopted for her own home with Wilde. Wolfe addresses the audience directly, drawing us into Constance’s world in a natural, confiding style, the whole piece told through her letters to Otto, often written with instructions that he destroy them afterwards, for fear her mother might read them. Her delivery is always clear and crisp even in the quieter moments of sharing something she considers a secret.
She takes us back to the start of a promising journey that ended so unhappily. Gradually, something of her early life emerges: her shyness, her lack of confidence – ‘no beauty, no conversation, no small talk’ as she puts it at one point – and her reluctance to consider marriage at all, until Oscar, whom she falls passionately in love with, in part because she feels him to be an intellectual equal.
Looking back at a story like this, it can be hard to see it from before it was known how things would end, to grasp the world of an innocent young woman whose life was bounded by home, a narrow social circle, and a mother who offered little warmth. Wolfe brings that world vividly to life, handling with real skill the moments where we know what’s coming and Constance doesn’t.
There is one area I felt could be polished a little: the blackouts between scenes. Some are brief and light, just enough to signal a new letter; others, where Wolfe leaves the stage to change costume or introduce a new child, dip the pace and pull focus from the story.
Overall, an excellent show that takes us into the world of a woman who deserves a great deal more attention from history shared by a strong confident writer/actor.
