Broadway review by Adam Feldman
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s fantastical 1891 novel—a gothic meditation on the blurry lines that separate art from life, appearances from reality, body from soul—there's a curious moment when the barrier between Wilde himself and the novel he is writing briefly disappears. “Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not,” he says, departing from third-person narration for the first and only time in the book. “It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.” This revealing blink of an “I” does not make the cut in writer-director Kip Williams’s dynamic stage adaptation of the book, a solo performed with astonishing stamina and skill by Sarah Snook. But it everywhere informs the production’s clever embrace of artifice and self-reproduction as theatrical devices.
One can see the appeal of this show for Snook at this time in her career. It's dangerous for an actor to be too closely associated with a single role, as she is at risk of being for her cracking portrayal of Shiv Roy on HBO’s Succession. What better way to avoid being pigeonholed than to spread her wings across 25 parts at once? In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Snook incarnates the narcissistic title character, the ultimate demon twink, who models for a worshipful portrait by the idealistic painter Basil Hallward. “How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young,” he laments. “If it were only the other way!” Wilde grants him this Faustian wish: Dorian never loses his surpassing good looks, while the painting ages hideously, reflecting his inner decay. In a sense, the novel is a more overtly queer-coded variation on a theme—the double life of a seemingly upstanding Victorian man who seeks perverse kicks in the poor part of town—that Robert Louis Stevenson explored in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The Picture of Dorian Gray | Photograph: Courtesy Marc Brenner
Snook embodies the fretful Basil, too, as well as the aphoristic aesthete Lord Henry Wotton, who drips with bon mots and malignant ideas. They are inversions of each other: Basil’s way of making Dorian into art, and thus expressing himself, is by capturing him on canvas; Lord Henry’s is to treat Dorian’s whole life as material to mold: “To influence a person is to give him one's own soul,” he says. “He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.” But both the idealist and the cynic can't avoid confusing Dorian’s beauty with virtue. (This central trio represents Wilde’s own self-multiplication in the book. As he wrote in an 1894 letter: “Basil Hallward is what I think I am; Lord Henry is what the world thinks me; Dorian is what I would like to be.”)
Snook additionally serves as the play's narrator and, very entertainingly, everyone else: a love-struck actress, a vengeful brother, a nervous chemist, an ancient servant and more than a dozen others of varying genders and ages and facial-hair preferences, some live and some on video. Performed in a single two-hour burst, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a marvel of coordination. For much of the night, Snook acts opposite prerecorded clips of herself as other characters, which appear on video screens that float beside her or above her head; the parts of her performance that are delivered in real time onstage are frequently filmed live and displayed on those same screens.
The Picture of Dorian Gray | Photograph: Courtesy Marc Brenner
What that means is that, although this is a solo show, Snook is rarely onstage alone; she is usually swarmed by an entourage of cameramen and dressers as—in spectacular sync with the tech—she moves from role to role and positions herself against a series of scenic backgrounds. What it also means is that, although Snook is performing live, you spend most of the time watching her in blown-up filmed images. (The set is by Marg Horwell, who also designed the sumptuous costumes, including a final get-up that evokes late-career Elvis; the impressive video design is by David Bergman.) She’s largely acting for the cameras, not for the audience. It’s a bit like watching a live reenactment of a documentary about the making of a play; the scenes are presented from behind-the-scenes angles.
The result is different in kind from Andrew Scott’s intimate, humanist turn in Vanya, the other current multicharacter solo play adapted from a classic of the 1890s. It is closer in spirit and in execution to Jamie Lloyd’s Broadway revival of Sunset Boulevard with Nicole Scherzinger. Like that show, The Picture of Dorian Gray deluges the stage with multimedia effects, and draws parallels between social-media culture and earlier forms of public image-making. (Filming herself on a mobile phone, Snook runs a selfie through a filter so many times that the image becomes grotesque.) And as in Sunset, these trappings transcend gimmickry because they are contiguous with—and find new ways to mirror—the central themes of the material. When it violates the borders between art and experience, that’s true to Wilde’s point. (“Before I knew you, acting was my only reality,” says the doomed thespian Sybil Vane, echoing a line that Lord Henry gets in the novel: “I love acting. It is so much more real than life.”) And to the extent that Snook’s undisguised pleasure in proving her range could be seen as self-indulgent, the show absorbs that critique in advance by being about narcissism—the narcissism of artists as much as that of their subjects.
The Picture of Dorian Gray | Photograph: Courtesy Marc Brenner
If this approach is inevitably short on emotional directness, it has the advantage of being able to preserve, through the use of narration, much of Wilde’s supremely witty prose. But Williams and Snook have a sneaky formal trick up their flowered sleeve: They boost the sense of drama by shifting the narrative voice. As the play nears its end (after a cinematic chase scene that Williams has added), the narrator recedes and Dorian takes over the telling of the story—still in the third person, but without the narrator’s tone of arch remove. This final version of Dorian, tormented by fear and conscience, gets increasingly desperate and frantic as the corrosion of his soul catches up to him. And as his tale becomes more urgently personal, so does Snook’s performance: By the finale, she is speaking straight out to the audience, and we are staring right back at her actual body, not a body mediated through somebody’s lens. It’s the show’s most stunning transformation of all—the folding of multiplicity back into singularity and sincerity—and Snook makes it a thing of beauty.
The Picture of Dorian Gray. Music Box Theatre (Broadway). By Kip Williams. Directed by Williams. With Sarah Snook. Running time: 1hrs 55mins. No intermission.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray | Photograph: Courtesy Marc Brenner
