Berliner Ensemble: De Profundis By Oscar Wilde

From the Berliner Ensemble, award-winning German actor Jens Harzer performs Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis. Directed by Berliner Ensemble Artistic Director Oliver Reese, this masterful performance captures Wilde’s impassioned reflection on his life and society.

In 1895, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years in prison – for being provocative; for loving men, for not hiding his true self and for defying convention. His trial was meant to be a warning to others – against the crime of homosexuality and his irrepressible drive for freedom and recognition. While imprisoned, he wrote a long, impassioned letter to his estranged young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. Later published as De Profundis, Wilde’s letter describes the unbearable pains and blissful pleasures of his love, as well as his views on art, Christianity, and incarceration, and a society that doesn’t tolerate what it doesn’t understand.

De Profundis is the last outcry of a broken but untamed spirit. Bankrupt and shunned by society, Wilde writes with literary mastery about contempt and loneliness, about pride and pain. What remains when everything that a person once was is taken away from them?

In German with English surtitles.