GROSS INDECENCY

In 1895 Oscar Wilde sued the Marquee of Queensberry for slander. The aristocrat was the father of his young lover Lord Alfred, and had publically labelled him a sodomite. It was all to end with a charge against Wilde for committing “grossly indecent” acts, and his sentence to forced labour in Reading prison. In Gross Indecency, author Moisés Kauffman, gathers the court documents of the scandalous trial, transcribed testimonies of the trials, personal correspondence, interviews, excerpts from Wilde’s plays and words uttered by his contemporaries, in order to give an account of the fall of the great men of letters.  In this play, Wilde displays all his wit, his desperation and his definitive and public failure. Gross Indecency is a “legal tragedy” akin to the trial of Socrates told by Plato. A fascinating tale in which a great seducer falls before the world he had seduced through his words.