Review: Cal Performances at UC Berkeley presents The Australian Ballet in Christopher Wheeldon’s OSCAR, Zellerbach Hall, September 25-27, 2026
Sunday morning at dance class, a fellow student asks if I have seen the Australian Ballet performing Christopher Wheeldon’s Oscar yet. Having seen the contemporary ballet about Oscar Wilde being presented by Cal Performances at UC Berkeley the previous night, she is eager to discuss it. In her opinion, the dancing is excellent and the music is great, but the story is quite confusing.
Arriving that afternoon for the matinee, I am forewarned. I pay careful attention to the program notes, and am encouraged by the initial presence of a Narrator character (Sean O’Shea) who, in spoken English, introduces the story of Irish writer, poet, and infamous aesthete. Wilde was the subject of several criminal and civil proceedings involving accusations of “gross indecency with young men,” for which he was imprisoned from 1895-1897. The ballet begins in a courtroom, where lively barristers in white wigs and long black robes vie for a good view of the notorious defendant. Seated, the barristers hinge their torsos steeply backward in opposition to their stiff legs which thrust forward. As the momentum of rival counsels’ arguments sway their opinions, they fold forward, seesawing with each new parry. Lifting their benches above their heads and arranging themselves in lines, they create the high-ceilinged corridors through which the newly convicted Wilde is escorted.
Rather than creating a linear narrative focused purely on Wilde’s choices and their dire consequences, choreographer Wheeldon, and his collaborators Alexander Wise (original story) and composer Jody Talbot choose to weave in several of Wilde’s fictional worlds, specifically the tragic story of disingenuous love, “The Nightingale and the Rose,” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray” whose plot hinges on a Faustian bargain for eternal beauty. Conceptually this makes sense; no man should be considered solely on his worst days, and the human failing these fables impart echo those which lead to Wilde’s demise.
By the end of the brief prologue scene, Wilde is confined to a cell with a solitary metal cot. The Narrator leaves too soon, and though Wilde’s imagination provides necessary retreat from harsh conditions, the reminiscence turns to madness, and neither we, the viewers, nor Wilde seems to know where fact and fiction diverge. Which is a long way of saying the story is at times very confusing, though it is up to the each of us how much that matters.
Talbot’s music, performed live by the Berkeley Symphony, is emotive and rich in percussive elements that drive the action of the ballet. The visuals are stupendous, thanks to the talented and innovative design team of Jean-Marc Puissant (stage and costumes), Jon Goldman (lighting), and David Bergman (video). As Wilde recalls reading aloud to his sons “The Nightingale and the Rose,” the fairy tale’s rose bushes are enchantingly crafted by fancifully costumed dancers. With diaphanous silken wings, a trio of white roses float through a forest like ghostly moths. Spikey, golden-encrusted branches sprout dramatically in the arms of the flower-petal-collared ensemble conjuring a bush of yellow roses.
Jill Ogai is spritely and fierce as the eponymous Nightingale. Searching for an elusive red rose desired to make truelove bloom, she is set upon by a thorny group of red-masked dancers who slink ever closer, seeking her life in exchange for their cherished ruddy bloom. Mezzo soprano Kara Dugan portrays the Voice of the Nightingale, hauntingly vocalizing Nightingale’s quest through exaltation to death. The projected large-eyed face of a friendly full-moon watches winkingly over this story of heroic sacrifice, and sheds bloody tears as love’s gesture is spurned and its fairy dies.
Onstage almost every minute of the two-plus-hour performance, dancer Jarryd Madden brings the character of Oscar Wilde to life with such full-bodied intention that we forget he is playing a role. His shuddering destitution resounds all the more heartbreakingly as viewed against the buoyant joie d’vive he displays in flashbacks to Oscar’s glamourous society life. Waltzing happily with his oblivious and trusting wife Constance, (Benedicte Bemet), displaying his dandyish flair and wit with ease among party guests, Madden is charming and fluid. Oscar’s movements are unique, less angular and less prescribed than that of the ensemble. The crucial moment when a striking young man, the winsome Robbie Ross (Jett Ramsay), is introduced to the couple and an attraction blossoms between the men is electric, foretelling future liaisons.
Evidence of the outlawed homosexual activity is present as a quartet of bare-chested men, entwined atop a single bed, lasciviously enjoy one another’s company. Yichuan Wang and Elijah Trevitt are fiendishly delightful as drag artists/dancing girls. Their flouncy skirts, sassy kicks and cartwheels, straight out of Manet’s Folies Bergère paintings, draw focus in every scene in which they appear.
Passion and madness characterize the heightened nightmare of Act 2. Oscar is physically and mentally compromised. He recalls the tempestuous times spent with the risk-taking and charismatic lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, “Bosie” (Adam Elmes), whose father, the Marquess of Queensbury, rises to their provocation, and vengefully plots Oscar’s ruin. In a show-stopping and vivid duet, steeped in passionate partnering for two men who complete each other, Madden and Elmes’s connection is deeply affecting.
Interspersed with these lived recollections are the fictional characters: the elegant and vain Dorian Gray (Maxim Zenin) and his portraitist Basil (Cameron Holmes) and a third man with a cane who interacts forcefully with Dorian, and whose identity I never sorted. Each time the muslin cloth masking the portrait is removed, we discover Oscar standing within the frame in prison khakis, a contorted withering version of a man.
The Narrator returns, at the end, to describe Wilde’s subsequent prison release and tragic death, not three years hence, on Parisian soil where he had fled. “I dreamed of him last night. I heard his golden voice put on beauty like a dress. I mourned the loss of unrecorded words” (verses from a sonnet Bosie wrote about Oscar) reverberate. Our final vision of Oscar is of him dancing with lightness and freedom, beyond the corporeal, surrounded by birds in feathery tutu, the moon’s now closed eyes, no longer watchful.
Oscar is a ballet which cuts an alluring, if mysterious, form across the dance floor. This ambitious return of The Australian Ballet to Berkeley after more than a century sets Cal Performances on course for an exciting and stimulating 2026-27 season.
Review by Jen Norris, published September 29, 2026
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Production Credits:
The Australian Ballet: Oscar© by Christopher Wheeldon
Synopsis by Christopher Wheeldon and Joby Talbot based on an original idea by Alexander Wise and Christopher Wheeldon
Christopher Wheeldon, choreography
Berkeley Symphony Orchestra
Jonathan Lo, Music Director and Chief Conductor
Joel Bass, Assistant Conductor
Kara Dugan, Voice of the Nightingale
Assistant to the Choreographer Jason Fowler Assistant to the Designer (Costume) Lynette Mauro Costume Design Associate (Revival) Sukie Kirk Lighting Associate Wheeler Mo
Joby Talbot, composer Jean-Marc Puissant, stage and costume design Jon Goldman, lighting design David Bergman, video design
Assistant to the Choreographer Jason Fowler
Assistant to the Designer (Costume) Lynette Mauro
Costume Design Associate (Revival) Sukie Kirk
Lighting Associate Wheeler Mo
CAST SUNDAY MATINEE SEPTEMBER 27
OSCAR Jarryd Madden
CONSTANCE Benedicte Bemet
ROBBIE Jett Ramsay
NIGHTINGALE Jill Ogai
BOSIE Adam Elmes
NARRATOR Sean O'Shea
CYRIL Reiley Kohler
VYVYAN Bryce Latham
QUEENSBURY Timothy Coleman
HARRI Yichuan Wang
ZELLA Elijah Trevitt
PROFESSOR'S DAUGHTER Amy Ronnfeldt
STUDENT Hugo Dumapit
WHITE ROSE 1 (SARA) Katherine Sonnekus
WHITE ROSE 2 (LILLIE) Sara Andrlon
WHITE ROSE 3 (ELLEN) Samara Merrick
DORIAN Maxim Zenin
BASIL Cameron Holmes
LORD HENRY Luke Marchant
SYBIL VANE Samara Merrick
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