Идеальный муж: Пьеса Оскара Уайльда

1895 play by Oscar Wilde
the play

An Ideal Husband is a four act play by Oscar Wilde that revolves around blackmail and political corruption, and touches on the themes of public and private honour. It was first produced at the Haymarket Theatre, London in 1895 and ran for 124 performances. It has been revived in many theatre productions and adapted for the cinema, radio and television.

In June 1893, with his second drawing room play, A Woman of No Importance, running successfully at the Haymarket Theatre, Oscar Wilde began writing An Ideal Husband for the actor manager John Hare. He completed the first act while staying at a house he had taken at Goring on Thames, after which he named a leading character in the play. Between September 1893 and January 1894 he wrote the remaining three acts. Hare rejected the play, finding the last act unsatisfactory; Wilde then successfully offered the play to Lewis Waller, who was about to take temporary charge of the Haymarket in the absence in America of its usual manager, Herbert Beerbohm Tree. The play was published in 1899 in an edition of 1000 copies; Wilde's name was not printed: the work was published as "By the author of Lady Windermere's Fan". It is dedicated to Frank Harris, "A slight tribute to his power and distinction as an artist, his chivalry and nobility as a friend." The published version differs slightly from the performed play, as Wilde added many passages and cut others. Prominent additions included written stage directions and character descriptions. Wilde was a leader in the effort to make plays accessible to the reading public.

In The Pall Mall Gazette, H. G. Wells wrote of the play:
1=It is not excellent; indeed, after Lady Windermere's Fan and The Woman of No Importance, it is decidedly disappointing. But worse have succeeded, and it was at least excellently received. But, taking it seriously, and disregarding any possibly imaginary tendency towards a new width of treatment, the play is unquestionably very poor. William Archer wrote, "An Ideal Husband is a very able and entertaining piece of work, charmingly written, wherever Mr. Wilde can find it in his heart to sufflaminate his wit. There are several scenes in which the dialogue is heavily overburdened with witticisms, not always of the best alloy. An Ideal Husband, however, does not positively lack good things, but simply suffers from a disproportionate profusion of inferior chatter." A. B. Walkley called the play "a strepitous, polychromatic, scintillant affair, dexterous as a conjurer's trick of legerdemain, clever with a cleverness so excessive as to be almost monstrous and uncanny". He found the plot unbelievable, and thought that although the play, "by sheer cleverness, keeps one continually amused and interested", Wilde's work was "not only poor and sterile, but essentially vulgar". George Bernard Shaw praised the play: "In a certain sense Mr Wilde is to me our only thorough playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theatre. Such a feat scandalizes the Englishman ". In 1996 the critic Bindon Russell wrote that An Ideal Husband is "the most autobiographical of Wilde's plays, mirroring, as it does, his own situation of a double life and an incipient scandal with the emergence of terrible secrets. Whilst Lord Goring is a character with much of Wilde's own wit, insight and compassion, Gertrude Chiltern can be seen as a portrait of Constance [Wilde]".

The first West End revival was presented by George Alexander in May 1914 at the St James's Theatre, and featured Arthur Wontner as Sir Robert Chiltern, Phyllis Neilson Terry as Lady Chiltern, Hilda Moore as Mrs Cheveley and Alexander as Lord Goring. The play was next staged in London at the Westminster Theatre in 1943–44, with Manning Whiley as Sir Robert Chiltern, Rosemary Scott as Lady Chiltern, Martita Hunt as Mrs Cheveley, Roland Culver as Lord Goring and Irene Vanbrugh as Lady Markby, set design by Rex Whistler. A London revival in 1965–66 ran at three West End theatres in succession; it starred Michael Denison as Sir Robert Chiltern, Dulcie Gray as Lady Chiltern, Margaret Lockwood as Mrs Cheveley and Richard Todd as Lord Goring. The play was again seen at the Westminster in 1989 in a short lived revival, and in 1992 a new production was presented at the Globe Theatre which was subsequently seen in four other London theatres and on Broadway between November 1992 and March 1999. It was directed by Peter Hall, and the original cast featured David Yelland as Sir Robert Chiltern, Hannah Gordon as Lady Chiltern, Anna Carteret as Mrs Cheveley, Martin Shaw as Lord Goring, Michael Denison as Lord Caversham and Dulcie Gray as Lady Markby. The various stagings of the production ran for an aggregate three years, the longest running production of a Wilde play. efn|1=The longest continuously running Wilde production was John Gielgud's 1945 production of Lady Windermere's Fan which run for 18 months at the Haymarket. It was revived on Broadway at the Comedy Theatre in 1918 with a cast including Norman Trevor and Beatrice Beckley as the Chilterns, Julian L'Estrange as Lord Goring and Constance Collier as Mrs Cheveley. The next (and at 2021 the most recent) Broadway presentation was Peter Hall's production, seen at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 1996–97, featuring its original West End lead players, except for the Lady Chiltern, now played by Penny Downie. An Ideal Husband was produced in Australia in April 1895 by the Brough Boucicault company; they gave the play its New Zealand premiere later in the same year. The Irish premiere was in Dublin in 1896, given (with no mention of the author's name) by a touring company managed by Hawtrey, at the Gaiety Theatre. The cast included Alma Stanley as Mrs Cheveley and Cosmo Stuart, promoted from his small role in the London production, as Lord Goring. A French translation was given in Geneva in 1944.

To mark the centenary of the first production, Sir John Gielgud unveiled a plaque at the Haymarket Theatre in January 1995, in the presence of, among many others, Wilde's grandson Merlin Holland and the Marquess of Queensberry.

There have been at least five adaptations of the play for the cinema: in 1935, a German film directed by Herbert Selpin and starring Brigitte Helm and Sybille Schmitz; in 1947, a British adaptation produced by London Films and starring Paulette Goddard, Michael Wilding and Diana Wynyard; in 1980 a Soviet version starring Lyudmila Gurchenko and Yury Yakovlev; in 1999 a British film starring Julianne Moore, Minnie Driver, Jeremy Northam, Cate Blanchett and Rupert Everett; and in 2000 a British film starring James Wilby and Sadie Frost.

The BBC has broadcast seven radio adaptations since its first, in 1926: a 1932 version starring Leslie Perrins and Kyrle Bellew; a radio version of the 1943 Westminster Theatre production; a Bristol Old Vic version in 1947 featuring William Devlin, Elizabeth Sellars, Catherine Lacey and Robert Eddison; a 1950 production with Griffith Jones, Fay Compton and Isabel Jeans; a 1954 version produced by Val Gielgud; a 1959 adaptation starring Tony Britton and Faith Brook; a 1970 version with Noel Johnson, Ronald Lewis, Jane Wenham and Rosemary Martin; and a 2007 adaption with Alex Jennings, Emma Fielding, Janet McTeer and Jasper Britton. BBC television adaptations were broadcast in 1958 (with Ronald Leigh Hunt, Sarah Lawson, Faith Brook and Tony Britton) and 1969 (with Keith Michell, Dinah Sheridan, Margaret Leighton and Jeremy Brett). A television version (Ein Idealer Gatte) in German was broadcast in June 1958 by Nord und Westdeutscher Rundfunkverband (NWRV) with Marius Goring as Lord Goring and Albert Lieven as Sir Robert Chiltern.