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This Picture of Dorian Gray Leaps Off the Wall
Brimming with color and directorial innovation, fabulously embodied by Sarah Snook.
There’s no knowing, without being told, exactly what tiny original seed gave rise to any complex work of art, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Australian director Kip Williams sat down with Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray one day, happened across those lines, and immediately dropped the book in a “Eureka!” moment. In his intoxicating whirl of a production—the first of a gothic trilogy, including Dracula and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which the director has developed his ultra-athletic, multi-camera “cine-theatre” technique—that passage, slightly trimmed, bursts from the stage as if fired from a confetti cannon, its sinister contemporary resonances glittering as they float down upon our heads. (If her current performance doesn’t leave you out of breath, just add to that the fact that she began rehearsing the role with a six-month-old baby, “in the depths,” as she told the New Yorker, “of pumping and breastfeeding.”) Yes, all of Wilde’s characters—from naïve, doomed Dorian, whose portrait will remain gorgeous while his soul rots, to the anxious, goodhearted painter Basil Hallward, to the louche aristocrat and exerciser of devilish influence Lord Henry Wotton—have their own distinctive costumes and coiffures, but it’s Snook who’s vaulting between their humanities, filling out figures both nuanced and wonderfully broad on a mostly empty stage.
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