Pity Constance, Oscar Wilde's wife. Not enough that she was overlooked during her lifetime, she has mostly been erased in death. For that, then, if nothing else, Thomas Kilroy's resurrection of her is welcome.
But, oh dear, it's not one of the happiest hours for Kilroy, Patrick Mason, or the Abbey Theatre who have brought their 1997 production to the Barbican's Bite festival.
In 1985, Kilroy wrote an excellent delve into public and private masks (no surprise that Kilroy has also translated Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author) with Double Cross, a play contrasting Financial Times editor and wartime Minister of Information, Brendan Bracken, with fellow Irishman and ''traitor'', William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw).
Kilroy is clearly interested in deception and the Wilde marriage was nothing if not dissimulation on a grand scale.
Constance emerges from Kilroy's study as a strong-minded, loyal, independent thinker with demons of her own to fight (as well as those produced by Oscar) and the victim of a still-mysterious staircase fall that probably shortened her life.
Contentiously, he suggests this fall may have been self-induced, the result of a deep sense of shame from possible childhood abuse and the tormented feeling she was fatally attracted to ''evil''. It's an interesting notion as is the whole bisexual side of Oscar's nature unusually illuminated here by Kilroy.
Unfortunately, his handling of his material fails to live up to such enlightenment. Nor does Mason's ultra-stylised, Bunraku-influenced production with its faceless puppet handlers help to lighten the often ludicrously over-heated symbolism surrounding Oscar's downfall and his martyrdom. One can only sympathise with the three principals, Robert O'Mahoney (Oscar), Jane Brennan (Constance), and Andrew Scott (Bosie) and the masked helpers. They've a thankless task.
n The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde runs until Saturday
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