As their website details “The Rose (Playhouse, Bankside) is an archaeological site” and tonight’s audience, many of whom were provided with blankets to cover and warm up their legs, watched the production unfold against the backdrop of the theatre’s excavation site, lit by light red rope lights and brimming with darkness, echo and atmosphere.

What a wonderful surprise this piece was. The intimacy of the space, the beauty of the text and the gravity of the subject matter demanded a performance of some clout and skill. In Wilde Without the Boy, Gerard Logan commanded the engagement of his audience from start to finish with stealthy but assured aplomb. He navigated the rhythms and images of Wilde’s words with such ease that it was hard to believe the lines were not indeed being birthed from his imagination at the very moment of speaking. His diction was so admirably perfected, it would satisfy even the harshest of Shakespearian dogmatists, but it was the genuine nature of the force behind his delivery that revealed us to his character’s humanity. These speeches were written to connect to ordinary people, not alienate them, and this is exactly what Logan manages to do.

In this hour-long monologue, Wilde narrates a letter sent to his former lover, in which he details the physical and emotional pain he has endured following his incarceration for what at the time were considered acts of a lewd and unsanitary nature. What Logan’s performance allows us to do is to truly empathise with a character so removed from any usual personality of our time. There are very few among us who would be able to relate easily to Wilde, but Logan allows Wilde to reach out and grab us by the hand. This intimate connection is created by a piece that seeks to illustrate the mutual sorrow that we all share in as human beings and celebrate it proudly.

Gareth Armstrong adapts and directs the piece so effectively because the lines are allowed to retain their power on the page without any loss in transference to the live event. The layering of certain sections into both pieces is done so neatly while the presence of the court, judge and prison wardens by way of sound effects is coordinated sublimely with Logan’s tableau of engaging expressions. The musical scoring of the piece works well, perhaps better here than in the second shorter piece, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, but both have their moments of perfect synchronisation with the action on stage.

Logan’s manner when discussing the plight of inmates and prison life at Reading Gaol differs subtly from that of his preceding performance; the former being one who is past it and now reflecting on their stormy period, while the latter is one who is still very much stuck in that protracted chaos. Logan portrays this chaos of men waiting for their moment of death and dying various deaths in the process. He conjures up a plethora of different moods and levels of angst, the same to which the prisoners would no doubt have been prone in their madness and loneliness. The tenderness and vulnerability he brings in Wilde Without the Boy to a man, who is essentially going on a jaded rant about an ex-lover whom he despised for his lack of intelligence and high-mindedness is a testament to Logan’s skill as an actor. We see and experience everything through Wilde’s world and feel the pangs of both guilt and outrage at having one’s life torn apart by another who exhibits no signs of remorse for whatever they leave in their wake. Wilde, Logan and Armstrong draw out the sorrow of these moments delicately for us to share in so that our own sorrow, to paraphrase King Lear, can seem more light and portable now that we know that that which makes us bend made Oscar Wilde bow.

After the curtain, Logan kindly thanks the small audience and tells them: “what you lack in quantity, you make up for in quality”. This is an apt a way as any to describe an evening in which two short pieces of wonderfully written verse and drama were masterfully executed at one of the most historic venues in British theatre.

Wilde Without the Boy & The Ballad of Reading Gaol is playing Rose Playhouse until 12 December. For more information and tickets, see Rose Theatre website.