FringeReview UK 2026
De Profundis
Berliner Ensemble
Genre: Adaptation, Autobiography, classical, Costume, European Theatre, Historical, International, LGBTQ+ Theatre, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Solo Performance, Theatre, Translation
Venue: The Coronet Theatre, Notting Hill
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
We see more Wilde embodied in this explosive performance lasting one hour 50 by Jens Harzer than any lyrically-wrought embodiment. Wilde’s De Profundis is brought to The Coronet Theatre by the Berliner Ensemble, directed by Oliver Reese till October 7.
Jens Harzer throws himself into it so much that when he almost stumbles on for a standing ovation the look of sheer bewilderment hasn’t left his face. Outstanding.
Review
It might seem the ultimate in Brechtian alienation to deliver a Wilde text in German translation with English surtitles. By the end though it’s anything but distanced and we see more Wilde embodied in this explosive performance lasting one hour 50 by Jens Harzer than any lyrically-wrought embodiment. Wilde’s De Profundis is brought to The Coronet Theatre by the Berliner Ensemble, directed by Oliver Reese till October 7.
Mirko Bonné’s translation seems to have been faithfully rendered back again, with – intriguingly – a couple of changed words. Harzer begins formally, loosening as the light tracks down and sculpts his body. Even so, his delivery is measured, Wilde quietly seething but in his first hour Harzer flays Bosie Douglas with four years of betrayals, callous heedlessness and – supremely – using Wilde as a cat’s-paw with his war on his father.
Predictably the stage is shrunk to a cabind’d cribb’d confin’d look. An edge-on tall box – like a Tardis in an Escorial – designed by Hansjorg Hartung reveals Harzer in a glow. That’s after the surrounding strip of light fades to reveal an iconic Wildean pose: a hieratic head. Lit by Steffen Heinke in succeeding yellows and stark white, with a reversion to lilac and blue, all invoke previous lives. Occasional blackouts reveal Harzer in a different pose: scrawling a charcoal scaffold up one wall, clutching a bag of clothes as if eternally primed for release (no early release here of course); and occasionally changing his shirt. Elina Schnizler’s costumes revert from pre-release smart to ragged prison-wear.
Jorg Gollasch’s faintly tolling music invokes The Ballad of Reading Gaol as well as the sacramental echoes of a De Profundis setting with discreet organ growls.
Two turning-points in their relationship seem to fix Wilde’s course. Wilde, getting away to Brighton and write (and doubtless indulge) nurses a fever-struck Bosie devotedly. When he catches the fever Douglas deserts him. Crucially though, after Wilde had dismissed Bosie and was primed for a life without him, Bosie’s elder brother shot himself in October 1894 aged 27. It was following a coercive affair with Liberal Prime Minister, Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery. Stung by his elder son’s suicide, their father Queensbury threatened Rosebery not to intervene in his vitriolic hate-campaign against Wilde. He could not accept both his sons were gay. Wilde cannot now resist supporting a distraught Bosie with the resulting vortex we all know.
After an hour though and moving to wider questions of art, it’s clear storytelling fades and something else is needed. Reese, Harzer and dramaturg Johannes Nolting leap over this by crafting a far more visceral telling. Harzer begins to cough and splutter alarmingly as he relates first the harrowing scene at Clapham Junction as he’s transferred to Reading.
Every day, Harzer’s Wilde recalls, he wept that same hour (2.30pm) for a year. Still, weeping is normal in prison. What Wilde doesn’t expect is the kindness of strangers: “It’s worse for you than us.” There’s glimmers too of a possible Wilde: who wants to speak up about prisoners’ conditions. That was immortalised in his Ballad, but it’s impossible to tell if he’d have followed through had he been allowed. Wilde himself reflected on his effective banishment from Britain; which renders that academic. Harzer then explodes in a fit of prison-fever, malnourished and shuddering.
Harzer rises in a gaunt chiaroscuro. His pronouncements on beauty and art are paradoxically delivered in a shiver of clothes-change, fumbling in a plastic bag and squatting awkwardly on the chair; or pushing his feet up against it when splayed on the stage floor’s tiny square. They alternate with his account of prison. There’s agonies of pause as his Wilde gropes towards letting demons go. Finally Harzer starts singing the famous refrain from The Ballad of Reading Gaol in English in an H K Gruber or Reinhard Goebel manner. Then there’s a sudden release as Harzer does the only thing left to him to do. Step out.
The Berliner Ensemble have stripped Wilde’s halo of Sebastian Melmoth dimensions and given him back his indignity; and indignation. It’s a necessary throat-grabbing to release a voice of agony and sheer desolation. Harzer throws himself into it so much that when he almost stumbles on for a standing ovation the look of sheer bewilderment hasn’t left his face. Outstanding.
