'The Picture of Dorian Gray' review

Simon Collins discovers an inventive adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s story, The Picture of Dorian Gray, at the Richmond Theatre...

OUR VERDICT

We are promised the picture by the title of the story. In any version of Dorian Gray, the audience will want to see the portrait that supernaturally becomes progressively more hideous revealing the rotting soul of its subject who no matter his foul, debauched and murderous activities, remains outwardly young and handsome. The adapter and director, Sean Aydon, has found a neat theatrical solution to this conundrum.

Dorian lifts the frame from the easel and peers through towards the audience. It is a clear pane of glass, the picture exquisitely real. Thereafter, the supernatural and gothic dimensions of the original story are quickly dispensed with, avoided in favour of a psychological meditation on the urge to experience mere pleasure, an important issue in any period but a significant position of rebellion against the increasingly repressive morality of the late Victorian Age.

The very notion, however, of irresponsible, utterly selfish pleasure-taking is decadent. Soon enough the casualties begin to accumulate. The intense emotions of the three main characters – two older men in love with the young, wicked Dorian in the middle – wrap and twist around the others’ desires, the tangle given eloquence by Wilde and streamlined for the modern ear by Aydon’s adaptation.

The single set design reinforces their mental state of decadence. A very large room such as one might find in a decaying mansion, with the surfaces of the walls peeling off, establishes for each scene a consistently forlorn attitude of disrepute, and help lift the manner of the story away from realism. As do the costumes which belong in no particular historical era, certainly more 1980s than 1890s. A Victorian chaise longue occupies the stage centre next to a mid-20th Century black rotary dial telephone. On the wall is a glass cabinet, occasionally illuminated, containing a knife and a handgun. The overall effect is suitably dreamlike – nightmarish.

That is fine as long as the audience, habituated to realism, suspends their disbelief (not helped yesterday by an old codger at the rear of the auditorium loudly groaning for some minutes as if from the grave); nor by a moment when the characters chatting about the nature of theatre gaze into the stalls illustratively but unwisely breaking the fourth wall.

In the present adaptation, the characters neurotically converse rather than rhetorically declaim in Wildean style. His polished paradoxes and gleaming antitheses are half-muttered as half-thoughts drifting, frequently lost on the large stage. Also noticeable is the abandonment of the strongly homoerotic mood of the novel that even in our enlightened times would add a wealth of shadows to a dark tale. Part of this shift is in the casting of two female characters as replacements for two males, James Vane and Alan Campbell.  Perhaps this signifies a wariness of possible controversy. Likewise, the orgy scene in a den of iniquity was far too fast and hygienic.

Given the problem of abridging a book-length story into two hours, and that this would not be a simple transposition from page to stage, the strategy of the adaptation is commendably inventive and the performances excellent, in particular, that of Gavin Fowler as Dorian Gray who must carry the entire drama. Visually the production is sumptuous.