Stephanie Turner is outstanding as the mysterious Mrs. Erlynne in the BBC's 1985 adaptation of Oscar Wilde's four-act comedy Lady Windermere's Fan: A Play about a Good Woman. One of four works of Oscar Wilde contained in the DVD called The Oscar Wilde Collection, LWF is an engaging story of jealousy and misread motives set among England's upper classes in the 1890s. Lady Windermere (Helena Little) is only nineteen but has already developed a rigid set of Victorian morals, though she remains naive and very innocent. Very much in love with her elegant husband Lord Windermere, played by a devoted but somewhat aloof Tim Woodward, she refuses to listen to rumors about her husband paying unusual attention to another woman, Mrs. Erlynne, until she confirms that her husband has been paying the other woman huge sums of money.
She becomes even more upset when Lord Windermere insists on inviting Mrs. Erlynne to her birthday ball against her vigorous objections. When Mrs. Erlynne appears at the party and dances with her husband, Lady Windermere is vulnerable to the passionate entreaties of Lord Darlington (Kenneth Cranham) who proclaims his love and asks her to leave her husband. Mrs. Erlynne, upon discovering Lady Windermere's plans, follows her and tries to stop her from what she considers a reckless and unwarranted action. The ending is full of surprising twists and turns that can only be called astonishing but very revealing of how we often jump to unwarranted conclusions about people.
Lady Windermere's Fan contains the usual acerbic wit of Wilde, whose brilliant career was shortened by his society's relentless Puritanism. Among the more famous quotes from the play are: "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes", "I can resist everything except temptation", and "History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality." The highlight of the play is the passionate speech by Mrs. Erlynne as she attempts to persuade Lady Windermere from making the same mistakes she made in her life.
Perhaps echoing Wilde's own experience with his treatment from society, she says, "You don't know what it is to fall into the pit, to be despised, mocked, abandoned, sneered at--to be an outcast! to find the door shut against one, to have to creep in by hideous byways, afraid every moment lest the mask should be stripped from one's face, and all the while to hear the laughter, the horrible laughter of the world, a thing more tragic than all the tears the world has ever shed. You don't know what it is. One pays for one's sins, and then one pays again, and all one's life one pays". Mr. Wilde paid and we were all the poorer.