A Perfect Gentleman

American Review:

A Perfect Gentleman Keeps Wilde Spirit Alive
Sunday Times, Trenton
by Tom Blackburn

Appleman's A Perfect Gentleman currently at the Walnut Street Theater, reminds one of Wilde not only because everybody on stage tosses off epigrams like method actors toss off "uhs" and "ahs," but because it goes right into the core meaning of mores and morals.

Chesterfield defends well the traditional virtues. His son doesn't buy them. Young Stanhope rejects an arranged marriage to an older and wiser sister of the prime minister for love in a garret with an Irish governess, like himself an illegitimate child.

Not the smallest virtue of A Perfect Gentleman is that there is conflict from the time the servant announces the first visitor, but there's no choosing of sides. In the end, Appleman and his characters reach an accommodation of viewpoints that will satisfy everyone but an ideologue. The production -- a joint venture of the new Walnut Street Theater Company and the Virginia Museum Theater -- makes the play's virtues clear.

My notes on Michael Allinson, who plays Lord Chesterfield, link "cynical" and "doting father" in the first scene. This seeming contradiction never seems to be a contradiction because Allinson shows us Chesterfield from the start, with and without his wig, trying to replicate himself in his son not because he loves himself but because he loves his son.

I'll admit I was wary of a play based on Lord Chesterfield's letters, which were written to be read, not performed. I was wrong.

Appleman hasn't so much used the letters (he says only 1 percent of the dialogue is from Chesterfield) as he has absorbed their spirit and then written a play in which Wilde could have taken pride.