On Thursday October 16th, as part of the Oscariana, there was a special screening of the Museum of Literature Ireland’s (MoLI) adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis in the Irish Film Institute (IFI). The Oscariana festival celebrates Wilde’s birthday and is in its third year. This year’s celebrations coincided with the 125th anniversary of Wilde’s death in 1900. De Profundis is a letter written by Wilde to Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas during his time in Reading Gaol, and is the only piece of writing completed by Wilde throughout his two year imprisonment.
The screening was followed by a discussion with the film’s creative director and MoLI Head of Exhibitions and Programming Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, and Katherine O’Donnell, a professor in the school of philosophy at University College Dublin (UCD), co-founding member of the Irish Lesbian and Gay Archive, and one of the actors who starred in the short film. The discussion was chaired by Maragaret Kelleher, professor and chair of Anglo-Irish literature and drama at UCD.
The film intersperses shots of key locations mentioned in the letter with various LGBTQ writers, activists and actors reading sections of the letter aloud, accompanied by a piano piece composed by Schlepper-Connolly. While the actual written text of De Profundis amasses some 50,000 words, the film takes about a third of the full text, according to Schlepper-Connolly. One of the challenges in making the film, he said, was choosing which parts of the letter to cut. He shared that he had “forgotten how relentless [the letter] is,” a comment that was met with laughter from the audience. Often there was an attempt where the same idea was repeated to cut the repetition, but the language was so beautiful that it was difficult to choose which parts to cut. The letter as a whole is explained by Katherine O’Donnell as a lesson to Bosie, an attempt to try to teach him how to love, and “because [Wilde] had such a ridiculous pupil he had to keep repeating the lessons”.
O’Donnell described how she first came into contact with the text during her time living in Cape Cod in the midst of the AIDS crisis. She met a young man who was dying from the disease, who asked her to read the text aloud as he wanted to hear the letter in her Irish accent. O’Donnell shared that De Profundis was seen as a “bible for coping with homophobia”, an idea that still rings true for her to this day. This story added to the profound experience of hearing Wilde’s words read aloud by these Irish actors within the film, echoing O’Donnell’s first experience with the text. The idea for the exhibition came about when MoLI was first founded in 2019 according to Schlepper-Connolly. One of the museum’s exhibitions involved recording various Irish writers reading extracts from Irish literature, and he heard Frank McGuinness read part of De Profundis aloud. Schlepper-Connolly described the almost weekly search by visitors to the museum for an Oscar Wilde exhibition, but that he feels this film represents quite a different Oscar Wilde to the public perception of him, fulfilling a “counter cultural motivation”.
The film certainly shows an incredibly vulnerable side to Wilde, and as Schlepper-Connolly said, “you can feel the process as he’s thinking as he’s writing”. The letter offers a look into Wilde’s thought process as he seeks to forgive Bosie for the pain that he has caused. This forgiveness, O’Donnell believed, was necessary for Wilde to be an artist again. He is looking forward to a time beyond his imprisonment in which he will be able to create again, and he doesn’t feel he will be able to do this if he still bears resentment towards Bosie, or indeed towards anyone.
In turn, the film offers a vulnerable connection between the actors and Wilde. Schlepper-Connolly shared that he saw the stars of the film as “avatars for Wilde”, while O’Donnell felt the “surreal” experience of being a “representative” for a group of queer people wanting to say thank you to Wilde. Margaret Kelleher explained that while Wilde was not strictly allowed to write during his time in prison, the form of the letter offered a loophole through which he was able to continue to write.
The discussion followed a few questions from the audience, wherein Wilde was compared to Nelson Mandela, the idea of suffering in art was raised, as well as questions around the kind of literature Wilde would have had access to in jail. The evening finished up with two final questions surrounding a lack of mention of class in many of the discussions of Wilde, with one audience member sharing she had been told Oscar Wilde was “too posh” for Irish people when she arrived to study in Ireland last year.
The De Profundis exhibition can be viewed at the Museum of Literature Ireland until August 2026. More information about the exhibition can be found at https://moli.ie/exhibitions/oscar-wilde-de-profundis.
