Snook thrills and dazzles in chameleonic tour de force
The Picture of Dorian Gray
★★★★★
STANDING ovations now are 10-a-penny but I’ve never seen one as swift or unanimous as that which greeted Sarah Snook as she took her bow at the end of her bona fide West End debut (she was last at the Old Vic, in The Master Builder, in 2016, over the river).
The award-laden Australian star ( Succession her calling card) had barely delivered the final line of The Picture of Dorian Gray before the audience at the Haymarket – former scene of Oscar Wilde premieres – were on their feet. And for once that, yes, wild applause seemed fully justified.
For almost two hours, the 36-yearold holds us in thrall, inhabiting all 26 characters in Kip Williams’ adaptation, narrating as she goes. Her shapeshifting is magnified by the livefilming of her every move. As well as watching her rove the stage, slipping in and out of changing interiors and easing in and out of costumes, we see her in close-up (screens of sundry sizes dropped in to relay her antics).
The mise-en-scène creates a darting sense of labyrinthine London but there’s nowhere for the performer to hide – and you need nerves of steel and talent in spades to tackle such a risk-taking theatrical and filmic challenge. From the start, though, you’re not only in the grip of a dazzling conceit (image-consciousness lying at the heart of the tale) but in the hands of an actress of exceptional pluck and mercurial power.
Snook begins in a languid fashion – describing the artist’s studio in which the beautiful hero is being painted for posterity – thereby begetting his Faustian wish for youthful immortality (the portrait will grow old, not him). The actress’s live-captured image dominates the front of the stage in a vast, full-length portrait.
In setting the scene, Snook conjures the two men surveying the portrait: the aesthete Lord Henry Wotton denoted by a lofty attitude and a cigarette, the painter Basil Hallward by a nervy air and a paintbrush. She oscillates between them as if toggling between computer screens – eyebrows entertainingly arching, her eyes windows to different souls.
At every turn, it feels as though Williams, directing, pushes things
‘She oscillates between the two men as if toggling computer screens – eyes windows to different souls’
further, and adds to the fiendish challenge. The Adonis-like figure of Dorian is achieved through the donning of an angelic blonde wig and a fluttering, girlish coyness, and interactions thereafter abound with pre-recorded, more fully costumed iterations of the characters – initially Wotton and Hallward, later a tableful of society bores.
Rather than being a gimmicky cheat, the head-spinning magic is that your disbelief is richly suspended; Snook, alone, seems to be engaged in realtime dialogue and there are even moments when the artifice is acknowledged, the performer tussling with a filmed persona over who should speak the next lines. Does the production have too many such playful laughs? The actress Sibyl Vane, who ruinously falls for Dorian, is depicted by Snook popping her head through a toy-theatre stage, a crass mass of curls and affectations. But Wilde’s cautionary tale always had the veneer of black comedy and Williams makes its ambivalent eye on temptation, vanity and narcissism a satire for today, using smartphone filters to ram home Dorian’s monstrous self-obsession.
It’s hard to care, perhaps, and aside from a canter through an opium den, all hallucinogenic colours and throbbing sounds, the evening stints on portraying the vice into which Gray plummets. But that’s the original’s insufficiency, too, and Snook doesn’t shortchange us on a chameleonic tour de force that flips genders as fast as pancakes and finally suggests – as cameras crowd in on all sides – Gray’s vicious, hollowed-out self fracturing in a way that combines Victorian melodrama with modern technological nightmare. Bravo.
Until May 11; doriangrayplay.com