It it's a member of the Redgrave clan performing a monologue at the National you're after, there's a wealth of choice at the moment.
Joining Vanessa's turn in The Year of Magical Thinking comes Corin, in an accomplished reading of Oscar Wilde's impassioned 1897 letter from Reading Gaol to his feckless lover, Lord Alfred Douglas.
A clever conceit from director Richard Nelson sees the light rise on Redgrave scribbling furiously in a notebook. His Wilde is, we gather, just putting the finishing touches to the missive, before he flicks back to read it to us from the start. Thus begins an avalanche of beautifully honed words bursting with anguish, bitterness and finally, movingly, reconciliation, with himself if not with the man whose "ill-fated and most lamentable friendship" ruined both Wilde's personal and professional lives.
Redgrave convincingly portrays a man broken both by love and hard prison labour. His pleasant, slight Irish lilt falters at the end of many sentences, as though he can hardly believe his own past folly in succumbing to Bosie's "alchemy of egotism". Tears, whether of pain or rage at some remembered cruelty, seem permanently imminent. Gone are the cut-glass epigrams with which Wilde made his name, wrenchingly replaced with rough-hewn, raw emotion.
Also 1 and 2 July (020 7452 3000, www.nationaltheatre.org.uk).
De Profundis
National Theatre: Lyttelton
South Bank, SE1 9PX
