With “Oscar,” Christopher Wheeldon Brings Explicit Same-Sex Love Into Classical Story Ballet

When David Hallberg commissioned a new show based on the life and loves of Oscar Wilde, he realised that in his own stellar dancing career, despite being a gay man, he had never danced a gay character. Such roles simply weren’t in the classical repertoire, says Hallberg, artistic director of Australian Ballet, “even though there were gay people dancing and creating work since ballet’s beginning”. How does he explain this? “I attribute it to fear,” he says. “But now we can change the course, without apology or fear.”

The choreographer helping change that course, as the ballet Oscar opens this month in Melbourne, is US-based Briton Christopher Wheeldon, one of the world’s leading dance-makers, whose ballets include adaptations of The Winter’s Tale and Like Water for Chocolate. Wheeldon had the first inkling of this idea years ago, after seeing the 1997 film Wilde, starring Stephen Fry. “I thought one day that might make an interesting ballet,” he says, speaking by phone from Melbourne.

The Fry film came a couple of years after some rare examples of gay love on the dance stage: Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, with its famously gender-swapped swans and David Bintley’s Edward II, about the monarch’s relationship with Piers Gaveston, both made in 1995. More recently we’ve seen male pas de deux in abstract and contemporary ballets, but – apart from a controversial if rather tame ballet about Rudolf Nureyev made in Russia in 2017 – that shift hasn’t moved into the classical, narrative realm. For Wheeldon, a gay man himself, it was time.

Wheeldon knew he didn’t want to make a straightforward bio-ballet of Wilde’s life, thinking the Irish wit turned toast of London society turned shunned convict was much too interesting and complicated a character for that. “He is the king of paradox,” says Wheeldon. “You can say Oscar Wilde led a dual life – his struggle with his sexuality and yet his loving marriage – but it was so much more complex.”

Wheeldon and his composer Joby Talbot hammered out the treatment together, even arranging a Zoom call with Fry to get advice on building their character. “We were quite nervous to talk to him,” Wheeldon remembers. “He regaled us with stories of Oscar’s wit and brilliance. I think Joby and I were as intoxicated by Stephen as many were by Oscar.”

What they’ve come up with is a ballet that tells the story of Wilde’s rise and fall and his great love affairs, with journalist Robbie Ross and poet Lord Alfred Douglas (known as Bosie), anchored in two stories penned by Wilde that Wheeldon felt were particularly personal. “I love how his stories and plays are so abundantly full of love but also deeply vulnerable,” he says. “It’s almost like Oscar holding up a mirror and not only accepting his flaws but in some way confessing his truth through the characters in his work.”

One is The Nightingale and the Rose, a fairytale from 1888 about a bird sacrificing itself to create a red rose for a student to give to a girl he adores, only for the girl to reject him. This story of being devoted to and then disillusioned by the ideal of true love forms the backdrop to the first act, while Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, offers a knottier portrayal of desire, vanity and downfall in the second half. It’s there – as Wilde sits in prison racked with guilt, shame and anger, lost in a “maelstrom of memories” – that the main romantic pas de deux takes place.

Wheeldon remembers Bintley’s Edward II as “really startling and quite beautiful” – but poetic and suggestive in its relationships, rather than explicit. Quite how explicit to make Oscar was the subject of much discussion. “How far do you go in the depiction of lovemaking on stage?” Wheeldon asked himself. “Is that going to be acceptable to an audience?” He laughs. “Australia is a very progressive country and it’s a new generation. Nobody bats an eyelid when there’s a pas de deux where two men lock lips. Coming from another generation, where we would never have seen that in ballet, I’m the one who’s sometimes a little bit eyes down.”

We talk about how it’s more normalised to see violence against women on stage – in some of Kenneth MacMillan’s ballets, for example – than to see love between men. “What’s wrong with normalising same-sex intimacy on stage?” says Wheeldon. “There shouldn’t be anything shocking about that.” The cast recently ran the second act for the first time, he adds, “and it was really moving and beautiful”.

As it happens, all the dancers currently playing Wilde are straight. Has there been any awkwardness? “No, actually,” says Wheeldon. “These big Aussie blokes – they were all fine with it. They’ve been wonderful and very relaxed and accepting. And they were all saying, actually, how beautiful it was to put themselves in the shoes of their queer friends and colleagues and be upfront telling their stories. That blew me away.” There’s been an intimacy coordinator on set, too, and on the first day Wheeldon sat the cast down to make sure they knew that if they were asked to do anything they felt uncomfortable with, they could tell him, “and I would immediately accept that and find another way”.

Wheeldon is an incredibly inventive creator of pas de deux (his After the Rain duet is an enduring favourite), always finding surprising new ways to orchestrate two bodies and their connections. Making male duets is not so different from making male-female ones, he says, only that the men aren’t on pointe, so the weight balance is different. But it is meaningful to Wheeldon to be able to portray the richness of same-sex love.

“I wanted to explore how love between two men can be very tender and masculine,” he says, “and also feminine and romantic. All the things I love about being in love with a man, I get to put into this piece. Yes, love is love. But love between two men is different from love between two women or a man and a woman, and it’s what I know.” Wheeldon’s been married to yoga and meditation instructor Ross Rayburn since 2013. “So I suppose that makes it much more personal.”

The Yeovil-born choreographer has been living in the US since joining New York City Ballet aged 19. He’s now 51. And while Oscar’s gay storyline seems to be no big deal in Australia, he laments the regressive politics he sees in his adopted homeland. He took up US citizenship in order to have a vote the first time Donald Trump ran for president, and when we speak he’s been glued to watching Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention. “I’m so excited and hopeful about what’s going on now. Let’s get her up there!”

It was at New York City Ballet that Wheeldon began his choreographing career, first with skilful, abstract neo-classical ballets, then moving towards narrative and theatre. His Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, made in 2011, is regularly staged around the world – you can see the Royal Ballet dance it in London from the end of this month. He won his first Tony in 2015 for An American in Paris, which he choreographed and directed, and his second for MJ the Musical, now running in London and New York and soon to open in Hamburg and Sydney.

Wheeldon had reservations about taking on MJ, both because of being a white director telling a Black artist’s story, and because of the accusations against Michael Jackson himself. “Even my friends, at the beginning, were like, ‘What are you doing? This is career-ending stuff.’” After the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota, Wheeldon really reconsidered his role, but the show’s Pulitzer-winning writer Lynn Nottage wanted him on board and at that point Wheeldon didn’t want to risk the whole thing folding and putting its cast of young Black performers out of work.

He understands why people would object to a show that glorifies Jackson – although he thinks they managed to sew some complexity into the story, rather than it being just a pop concert. “I am completely accepting of people who don’t want to see the show,” he says, “or don’t think I should have done it.” Does he believe the accusations against Jackson? “Honestly?” he says. “It’s very hard to know. There isn’t really any proof and he wasn’t convicted, but many believe it to be true.” His instinct is to separate the art from the artist. “There’s this incredible body of music that isn’t going away, that inspired so many people and continues to give so much joy to people.”

With receipts of $200m and counting at the box office, MJ is by far Wheeldon’s biggest commercial success, but it’s his passion for storytelling, for delving into flawed characters and exploring the endless expressive possibilities of the body on stage that really drives his ever-expanding career. Does theatre work influence his ballets? “It’s definitely morphed the way I tell stories,” says the choreographer, who’s now tinkering with Alice for its latest revival. Each project, it seems, feeds the next. “They’re all wonderful ingredients in a big old stew,” he says, before going off to stir the pot.