Snook plays a succession of 26 characters ... and what a Wilde success!
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY Haymarket Theatre, London ★★★★★
WELL, if you thought ht this might be a chance ce to catch the real al Siobhan Roy, or rather er the real Sarah Snook, k, unmediated by a film crew (as she he is in TV’s Succession), then n you’d be wrong.
No, much more exciting than that, it’s ’s a chance to see Snook wrestling with a high- tech theatrical monster in a daring, visually stunning and finally ly exhausting adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s ’s 19th-century novel.
Playing 26 characters from the book – and nd presenting them in the style of an art gallery video installation — this is a show that is as brilliant in its conception as it is mesmerising in its execution.
Playful and serious, it reinvents Wilde’s Jekyll and Hyde tale of a young socialite at first freed, and then tormented, by a portrait that keeps him looking young.
Snook is serviced like a Formula One racing driver by a team of crack stage hands and film crew, deftly and speedily fitting her with cigs, wigs, and facial hair.
She turns to different cameras, presenting different characters in various roll- on, roll- off fin- de- siecle society London settings.
And all that’s relayed to a kaleidoscope of canvases, moving across the stage like gigantic screen savers. savers Inevitably, Inevitably there are moments when you catch Snook’s famous Shiv in close-up – the recoil, the wince and the sceptical facial squeeze.
But this is a unique virtuoso performance, matching Wilde’s love of artifice with her own gender-fluid take on the story that is (fear not) never trite or woke. Instead, it is by turns intense, mischievous, elegant and grotesque.
She starts in neutral: hooded, snake-green peepers, eyeing us from beneath a neoThatcherite perm.
And then she cunningly mutates into the pretty boy socialite Dorian – winning a laugh with a curly Marilyn wig and stick-on whiskers, set off by a pink velvet coat.
Amusingly, she winds up looking like a blonde, corseted Elvis... after a two-hour work-out k t in the gym. One high point is a dinner party, featuring Snook dressed as six high-society gargoyles – including one with a lap dog sniffing at her ankles.
BUT her real acting chops go into the two main characters: Dorian’s smirking mentor Henry, who despatches some of Wilde’s finest aphorisms (‘It is not good for one’s morals to see bad acting’); and the talented but fearful artist friend Basil, who paints the dreaded portrait.
Kip Williams’ production, first seen in 2020 in Snook’s native Australia ( starring Eryn Jean Norvill) augments the illusions with another avatar of Snook popping up behind her army of characters as a photobombing narrator.
But also woven through the show is music – ranging from Donna Summer to Handel, Vivaldi and Mahler – adding pulse, elegance and melancholy.
The want of an interval does make it hard work over the two hours, and a chase through woodland at the end has the feel of cod-Victorian melodrama in the style of Benny Hill.
But this is an exceptional and unusual piece of work that also presents Snook’s Dorian as a prototype TikTok influencer – editing her face on a mobile phone for plumper lips, longer lashes and bionic eyebrows – and bringing this cautionary tale bang up to date, in form and content.