The Picture of Dorian Gray, review: painting replaced by selfies in an up-dated satire on beauty
When it comes to portraying haunted disquiet, young actor Fionn Whitehead, 23, somehow arrived on the scene having fully mastered the art of it. Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk fired on all cylinders on many fronts. But it was the fearful, famished looks of Whitehead’s beachbound soldier (Tommy) that brought the thrumming nightmare home with pupil-dilating subtlety.
That same gift for registering inner perturbation – letting it steal across his face – is found anew in this smart streaming version of Oscar Wilde’s only novel, in which Whitehead takes the title role.
There are several reckonings in front of a mirror. The actor runs a hand over his chiselled, feline features and fingers the ghoulish symptoms of emerging damage - blotches and blisters - as if his creeping Faustian ruin has taken the form of a spreading viral infection.
Hang on a minute, though - isn’t the idea of The Picture of Dorian Gray that its handsome anti-hero stays fresh-faced while the portrait of him freakishly festers and corrupts out of sight in the attic? Yes, but, daringly, writer Henry Filloux-Bennett has flipped the concept to bring an 1890 tale (that relishes the vices it ostensibly finally cautions against) into the Instagram age.
Here, the fateful bargain involves Whitehead’s handsome young English student becoming dependent on a special “filter” concocted by his artist-friend Basil (the portrait-painter in the original). A gift on his 21st birthday, it means that every selfie he takes, and every appearance on his social media channel, radiates a glow that puts him in a league of his own; his follower count rises even as his physical essence decays.
As a satire on the dark, digital state we’re in, the update is bang on the money – the lockdown year has seen the rise of curated virtual identities; Filloux-Bennett’s script neatly references this by largely confining Dorian to his hall of residence. The issue is that once you’ve admired the intellectual thrust of the adaptation – directed by Tamara Harvey (and filmed, in just five days, at the Barn Cirencester) - you’re not quite given enough to stay on tenterhooks.
As with the prior project this regional theatre cohort worked on last year – a canny sequel to Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! - some big names have been recruited to boost box-office appeal (with takings flowing to a wider range of regional venues too).
The story is again told in retrospect via an investigative documentary format, the making of which we observe, mixed in with relevant fly on the wall footage. Wildean aphorisms barge their way into the dialogue, like peacocks amid pigeons. Joanna Lumley’s purring Lady Narborough (an aristocratic amalgam of certain characters in the book) regally fields questions from Stephen Fry’s remote-calling interviewer, while Alfred Enoch’s languid Harry Wotton (with mock Victorian moustache and dandified floral jacket) does the same on a library sofa.
Given that we’re told in advance that it will go horribly wrong, all the suspenseful music in the world can’t entirely raise the dramatic stakes. Whitehead starts as a guileless every-lad, but framing him as a victim of the times doesn’t make us care much more about him; you wish he’d been given more flamboyant devilry and the pace flags at points.
Still, this is undeniably a substantial cut above much else we’ve seen from British theatres since the virus struck. The production – miraculously delivered within lockdown constraints, on a shoestring of £25k – musters a ton of whizzy visuals and somehow coats its lead in an added aura of beauty. Recommended then, just, but outright social-media addicts may find their attention straying to their other devices.
Until March 31. Tickets: pictureofdoriangray.com
