Singular life
Driven to shame
Petronella Wyatt
Iam feeling ashamed. The other day I
went with my nieces to see The Importance of Being Earnest, with Colin Firth and Rupert Everett. Don't bother. There can never have been such a travesty of an adaptation of a Wilde play. If you want to see it done well on film, get out the old video with Michael Redgrave and Michael Denison. At least the cast knew how to speak the lines. The Americans don't really understand Wilde, although they may pretend to. This is why they invariably tend to call An Ideal Husband The Ideal Husband.
In any case, Earnest is my least favourite of Wilde's plays. Bernard Shaw, before he started hectoring us mercilessly on social ism in his own offerings such as Major Barbara, was a theatre critic. When Wilde's earlier plays were derided by the other crit ics, and someone even wrote that anyone could knock off one of them in a week, Shaw leapt to his defence and said he wished he could do the same. The critics loved Earnest, however. Yet Earnest was the play Shaw didn't like.
He was, I think, for once right. Earnest is the only Wilde work without any sort of a lesson. Consider An Ideal Husband, which is about a politician who has behaved corruptly, lied and must face up to the truth or lose the love of his life. There was a serious point here, and the play was all the better and, curiously, funnier for it. As far as I can
make out, and I say this humbly, there seems to be no serious point to Earnest. It appears to be simply a string of one-liners hung on the skeleton of a childish and absurd plot.
But that is not why I am ashamed. It is because my 17-year-old niece Genevra told me she was taking her driving test in two weeks' time. I, too, took driving lessons when I was 17. I wasn't very good at them.
Whenever the instructor told me to turn left I turned right and parallel parking was simply beyond my powers. But perhaps I was lazy. My A levels came up and I neglected to try again. Now, in my thirties, I still can't drive. When people find this out, I use two excuses. The first is that it is too expensive to run a car in London, and the second that there is nowhere to park one. It is true that many of my friends only use their cars in the country for the same reason.
But I seldom get away with this line of argument. so I tell them that in Arab countries women don't drive at all — by law. But once, when changing this law was under consideration, it was mainly the women who protested. These same women protested when the Shah of Iran ordered them to unveil. This is partly, I suspect, because women are more conservative than men and dislike change. But, as for their driving, I have a sneaking feeling that they also prefer being ferried about to having to do it themselves.
It is indubitably true that it is much more pleasant to sit in a taxi than to drive. Eliza Doolittle told Professor Higgins not that she wanted a car, but that her ambition was to ride in taxis. There are so many things one can do in a taxi. I mean read, work, listen to Walkmans etc., be a little tipsy. And if the taxi-driver has an accident, he pays the bill, not you. Of course habits die hard. I am still yelling at taxi-drivers to turn left when I mean right, which makes them confused and sometimes very mad indeed. But why should we single women be bullied into driving in London when we don't want to? I intend to stand up resolutely for my right to free choice as a modern girl.
However, I still have a sneaking feeling that I should drive. What if I had children? It would be a trifle embarrassing to take them to school in a taxi, especially as they tend to leave detritus in every vehicle in which they travel. Then there is the difficulty of finding a cab in the middle of the night if something goes wrong.
This has already been a problem with Mimi the dog. Occasionally, having a small gullet like all papillons, she starts to choke at one in the morning. If I can't find a taxi, I fear having a dead dog on my hands. In any case, some taxis will not accept dogs as passengers, even if you wrap them in blankets so that they resemble babies. 'I'm not having that dangerous animal in my cab,' they snarl at this tiny creature about the size of a hamster.
So perhaps I shall have to bite the bullet, or rather the tyre. Next week I intend to enrol for a course of driving lessons. You may read about them in this column, unless my instructor sacks me, which one of the last ones did. It will be odd starting all over again at my advanced age, but I intend to begin a new life of absolute practicality. This is why I bought a pair of velvet breeches at Yves St Laurent this week, but declined to purchase the matching jacket. Economy, determination and hardiness are to be my three aspirations for the future. Watch this space.
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