MERLIN HOLLAND had already assembled the story of the trial of his grandfather Oscar Wilde when theatre entrepreneur John O’Connor emailed him about turning his publication into a play. “I rang John and found him well-informed and obviously serious.

It wasn’t the usual breathless enthusiasm, so when he asked if I would be interested I said yes,” says Holland.

When Holland got hold of the original trial document he discovered that all the previous versions had been censored.

“For example they didn’t use the words ‘unnatural practices’ or ‘gross indecency’ and all the rest. They were absolutely blunt, simply calling it sodomy, and we hadn’t known that before. It was fairly raw stuff. We thought of the Victorians as mealy-mouthed about homosexuality. There were many differences between what had been accepted and what I had in my hand.

“When I did the trial transcript back in 2003, I got two actors to launch it at The British Library. Steven Berkoff played Carson and Corin Redgrave was Oscar, in a one-off, onenight performance. It was the only time in my life when I had two rather well-known actors on stage asking, ‘How do you want me to play it’?” he says.

Cheltenham Festival rang Holland some months later and asked if it could do it again.

“At the very last minute Corin, who was having health problems, had to pull out. So I asked Steven, who can be quite difficult about who he performs with, what we should do. I said I’d do anything, pull out any stop to get him another Oscar. He said, ‘It’s getting a bit late so it’s best if you do it’. He’d heard me lecture and talk and so on and thought I be fine. So we met up two hours before the reading and just did it. Nothing like starting at the top.

“I joked about this with my German publishers and the next thing I knew they had booked ten gigs round Germany over a period of two weeks to promote it.”

Holland trimmed the trial down to an hourlong account of Oscar’s love for Douglas, his relationship to art and literature and his relationship to the rent boys.

“The two-hander was sent to John O’Connor, who said, ‘I think we can probably use most of this’. We added the defence cross examination by Edward Clark and the questioning by Carson. We compressed the other two trials down to the relationship between Oscar and his art, Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie), the rent boys and the various witnesses.” The plays starting point is The Marquis of Queensbury, Bosie’s father, appearing at the box-office with a “bouquet”

of rotten vegetables. Refused admission, Queensbury left a card saying, “To Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite [sic]”. Police arrested Lord Queensbury and charged him with libel at the Vine Street police station.

Holland wanted to know the truth about his grandfather, and his research changed his perception of how Oscar Wilde acted and reacted throughout the trial period.

“One of the interesting things,” he explains, “and it’s only a small point but quite an important one, is that the old editions of the libel trial in particular have had Oscar starting off with the words, ‘I am the prosecutor in this case, my name is Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. I went to Trinity College in Dublin where I won the Berkeley gold medal for Greek and my father is a throat surgeon in Dublin’.

“What in fact happened was that his counsel put the questions to him and Oscar went from being modest to clever to slightly arrogant to scoring points. Then it comes to that pivotal point where he begins to talk himself into prison and he is asked. ‘Did you kiss the boy?’ ‘No,’ came the reply. ‘He was far too ugly’.”

In the second trial, Wilde made the very moving speech about the “love that dare not speak its name”.

“I think he’s already realising that he’s in pretty hot water and there’s a good chance of him being sent to prison. I think he realises that if he is going to go down, he may as well go down fighting and explain what he stands for,” says Holland.

On the subject of the 1997 biographical film with Stephen Fry in the title role, Holland says: “It was a difficult part to play, I remember the director saying, ‘For God’s sake don’t play it like Stephen Fry or the critics will crucify us’. But in a sense Stephen Fry is very much the latter-day Oscar Wile; he’s intelligent, he’s amusing, he’s good company, he’s well read, erudite. It was a good performance and a moving film, but extraordinarily they missed the bit out where he talks himself into prison.”

Merlin Holland’s father was born Vyvyan Oscar Beresford Wilde, but after Wilde was convicted of “gross indecency” and imprisoned, his wife, Constance, changed her surname and those of her two sons to Holland before fleeing to Switzerland. “The Hollands were my maternal grandparents,” he explains Holland admits to be only slightly troubled by his Christian name, Merlin. “Inevitably, I got Marilyn at school; schoolchildren are very cruel. I understand Merlin was Father’s idea and it was only later someone pointed out to my father that Merlin was supposedly sired by the devil, but he kept that one quiet.”

He has thought about changing his surname back to Wilde, but “there would always have been accusations about cashing in on the name”.

“I think I would have loved him because he gave me his genes. I think he would have been like one of those wicked relatives who goes off to foreign parts and returns with wonderful stories. He would have been a marvellous grandparent to have had, the sort who, when your parents say, ‘You mustn’t do that’, takes you off and gets you to do it.”

His favourite Oscar Wilde quote? Aptly: “Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to describe the wickedness of others.”

  • The Trials of Oscar Wilde is at The Georgian Theatre Royal on Saturday October 11. Box Office : 0174-882-5252