‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ Theater Review: Sarah Snook Is Phenomenal in Bravura Oscar Wilde Adaptation

If Sarah Snook felt at all concerned about how to follow her career-defining, award-winning turn as Shiv Roy on Succession, a fear of ever reaching such heights again, of even coming close to filling that professional hole, then she must now feel rather blessed — if also, every night, unbelievably exhausted.

Snook returns to the London stage for the first time since 2016, when, pre-Shiv, the relatively unknown Australian actress shone opposite Ralph Fiennes in The Master Builder. Now, she carries the massive weight of Kip Williams’ bravura adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s only novel. Snook plays not just the eternally young but damnably debauched Dorian Gray, but every one of the 26 parts in two unbroken hours of ceaselessly kinetic, highly choreographed, tech-heavy action. And she’s phenomenal.

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The show itself arrives with a big rep to live up to. Williams, the Sydney Theatre Company’s artistic director, stages his own adaptation, which received great acclaim when it premiered in 2020, playing three sell-out seasons in Sydney and touring Australia. (Snook has taken the acting baton from Eryn Jean Norvill, credited here as dramaturg and creative associate.)

Not only does Williams draw Wilde’s themes into the contemporary light, as bitingly prescient, but he presents the story itself — of a young man whose portrait reveals the age and moral decay that his own visage does not — through a dazzling orchestration of actor, on-stage live cameras and pre-recorded performance. The result survives the hype, as an imaginative, witty, thought-provoking, exhilarating piece of storytelling.

It begins quite calmly. The stage is empty, save for a large, vertical screen that will dominate the action (later to be accompanied by others). Behind it, Snook enters with some of the crew who will be with her throughout the night — operating cameras, moving sets, handing her props, or assisting in her many costume changes. For now, she is dressed in black blouse and blue trousers — as the story’s narrator and looking, for the only time, like herself.

Snook’s face appears live on the screen, shifting by dint of a facial expression, a turn of the head and a vocal modulation between the narrator and two others: the nervy, lovesick artist Basil Hallward and his assured and decadent friend Lord Henry Wotton. From the edges of the screen a hand offers Snook a paintbrush for one character, a cigarette for the other. There’s an immediate skill and humor here, which becomes more delightful with her first, speedy, on-stage costume change and the introduction of the bright-eyed, curly-blond, slightly feminine Dorian, a naïf who’s ripe for corruption by the dastardly Wotton.

In fact, poor Dorian is the victim of a simultaneous seduction: on one side, Wotton’s amoral and hedonistic philosophy (atmospherically administered here as something like hypnotic suggestion), on the other Basil’s painting, capturing an impossible beauty that even Gray must acknowledge. This results in the youth’s ill-fated exclamation that he would rather see his image age than his own face.

Once Dorian is seduced, Williams escalates his multilayered action. Sometimes Snook is acting directly to the audience, at others in front of a combination of cameras (handheld, on a body rig, on a tripod), her image sent live to one of the screens; sometimes these live images co-exist with pre-recorded ones, allowing multiple characters to be presented at once. All, including Hallward and Wotton, will be fully costumed and bewigged.

At one point, Snook acts alongside some tiny marionettes; as Dorian starts to lose his mind, she uses a smartphone and a face editor to create hideous distortions of herself, also transported to the screen. Once or twice, Dorian and the narrator argue with each other over who is to take up the storytelling.

At times this genuinely feels like magic; it’s certainly impossible to fully understand the choreography of the people and media that pull it off. Plenty of other directors use video and onstage cameras these days: Ivo Van Hove, particularly with Network, springs to mind. But to require a single actor to exist at the heart of it all is a big ask.

Williams’ approach allows Snook to utilize both camera and stage muscles: acting into the camera and exploring her face in clinging close-ups, at times wet with effort and emotion; but also using every inch of the stage, pursued by the camera and costume team, who swarm around her, nudging her physicality this way and that. At one point, as Dorian descends into an opium den, Snook actually walks beneath the theater, unseen were it not for the camera on her shoulder.

There’s a sense in the early scenes of Snook’s own enthusiasm, caught up with Dorian’s; just as, two hours later, the actor’s physical exertions, magnified onscreen, are indistinguishable from the character’s increasing mania. In between, she conjures her many other characterizations — from high society dolts to doting servants to underworld denizens, from Sibyl Vane, the actress whose death propels Dorian into his life of decadence, to the brother who vows vengeance.

Andrew Scott has also carried a recent London production solo, taking on all eight roles in Vanya; while Scott chose to languidly delineate his characters through minimal props and, for the most part, his own voice, Snook takes a bigger, more expansive approach. At times, it’s impossible not to think of the mirthful, multiple character-playing of the great Alex Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets; at others, the always theatrical Orson Welles, whose fondness for disguise could never, as with Snook, compete with his own expressive features.

At the same time, perhaps her most striking character change is within Dorian himself: not simply that the curls have been replaced by a cocky quiff, but the voice has changed, becoming much more like Wotton’s, who was so very keen to influence him.

Influence is one of the key themes of the piece, one of the many mooted by Wilde that Williams cannily reverberates across time, bringing to mind today’s would-be “influencers,” whose effect too often occupies an unfortunate zone between banal and malign.

The obsessions with youth, beauty and status, the preference of outward show and contrived experience over genuine connection, are all magnified by the play’s approach, epitomized by Dorian’s face-edited selfies, splattered across multiple screens. And Wotton’s many aphorisms invariably ring true. “The only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about,” would apply to almost anyone seeking the public eye, as might the buffer that social media offers between action and responsibility.

Rather than an affectation, the use of a single actor is true to Dorian’s split personalities — the outward beauty and inner ugliness, the youthful and decayed, the unrepentant and the tortured. In an appropriate twist, Williams never reveals the portrait itself, underlining the fact that of all Dorian’s images, the one denied to the public would be the true reflection of his soul.

The pacing of the play’s final stretch could have been better managed: Dorian’s murder of Basil is followed by a tidal wave of hysteria that is unmodulated and eventually wearing. But this is only a quibble, perhaps born out of empathy for Snook’s Herculean effort.

Venue: Theatre Royal Haymarket, London
Cast: Sarah Snook
Playwright: Kip Williams, adapted from the novel by Oscar Wilde
Director: Kip Williams
Set and costume designer: Marg Horwell
Lighting designer: Nick Schlieper
Music and sound designer: Clemence Williams
Video designer: David Bergman
Dramaturg and creative associate: Eryn Jean Norvill
Presented by Sydney Theatre Company, Michael Cassel, Adam Kenwright, Len Blavatnik and Danny Cohen, Daryl Roth, Amanda Lipitz and Henry Tisch, Jonathan Church

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