Perfectly befitting for a stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is Vanity that takes centre stage in this production of Oscar Wilde’s seminal novel. Succession star Sarah Snook deftly dances her way through a whirlwind of 26 characters, all the way from the jittery painter Basil Howard to the devilish Henry Wotton.
In other one-person performances, if you don’t have a full view of the stage for whatever reason, it is quite common for the play to turn into a fully auditory experience for a fair few minutes. This is never the case in The Picture of Dorian Gray, as the audience is treated to a full view of Snook’s every movement thanks to a series of screens that project both Snook’s performances captured live on camera and pre-recorded footage Big Brother-like for the whole theatre to see.
Because Snook almost never leaves the stage, all the filming, costume changes, prop placements and screen manoeuvrings happen in full view of the audience. This gives the performance an air of curated artistry as the play straddles between naked transparency and careful concealment.
We are able to see the whole intricate operation, as Snook changes from one character to another with a mere arching of her eyebrow or a pursing of her lips when she looks from one camera to another. These transformations are aided by how each camera captures her performance as her image is livestreamed onto a mobile phone-like screen on the centre of the stage. Everything from the camera angle, its focus, and its distance adds to the characterisation of each of Snook’s performance.
What this detracts from the “traditional” theatre experience however, is how the room the audience has for viewing the production on our own terms becomes a lot smaller, as the main performance is selected and packaged for us -albeit in real time- by the camera.
But this is precisely how the play makes a reference to our social media obsessed culture, where every waking moment worthy enough to be remembered is captured on a screen and projected to the world. Indeed, the play is not so much about unbridled hedonism in the 1890s than the narcissistic decadence of the digital age.
These comparisons are not always overtly apparent, but its essence is infused all the way throughout the production. At its most explicit moments, Snook’s Dorian Gray fiddles with filters on his phone to augment his skin texture, eyebrows, rouge lips, and chiselled jawline until a grotesquely cartoonish figure emerges. As she skilfully transforms from one character to another while interacting with herself on screens, we see Snook on Snook on Snook, like a theatrical rendition of a TikTok comedy skit where one person is the star of the show. And in scenes much like in real life, the Dorian Gray we see on stage flits between camera lenses, checking himself out in some and shunning in feigned shyness in others.
Indeed, social media profiles have become a key reference point in which we judge a person’s character and lifestyle- intentional or not. On each curated grid on an Instagram profile or an edited TikTok reel, we make inferences to a person’s physical qualities, tastes, and personality despite knowing that much of online content -visual or otherwise- are filtered and inevitably self-censored. Is this any different from the naïve mantra that Basil Howard, the artist enraptured by Dorian Gray’s beauty, lives by? ‘Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed.’
These excessive expressions of duality, metanarrative, and philosophical paradoxes that canter unbridled throughout the play are only twenty-first century extensions of Oscar Wilde’s original critiques on the nature of the self and art in the late nineteenth-century. Is artistic excess and a hedonistic lifestyle essential for self-liberation? Or are they one-way tickets to self-destruction? With the addition of selfies, filters, and gaudy costumes, this play certainly takes theatrical indulgence to a Wildean extreme, but it is Sarah Snook’s performance that makes it theatrical indulgence at its best.
Get the tickets (if there are any left) before the last performance on 11 May 2024.
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