The Letter in the Drawer.

Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband has just closed a limited run at the Lyric Hammersmith, a bold new staging that ended this month, a century after the play was last performed on that stage. What lingers is how little the machinery of scandal has aged. There is a moment when Sir Robert Chiltern, the model statesman, is confronted with the single compromising fact on which his whole career rests. Years earlier he sold a cabinet secret, and the proof sits in the hands of Mrs Cheveley, who has carried it from the Suez era for precisely this occasion. The play is usually staged as a comedy of manners. It is really a study of how reputations carry their secrets, and what happens when someone decides the moment has come to charge interest on them.

Wilde understood that such a document is never merely a record. It is a claim held in reserve, waiting for the political weather to make it valuable. Mrs Cheveley does not move against Chiltern because she has found something new. She moves because the timing has finally turned in her favour. The proof was........

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