Interview with director of Dorian Gary at Richmond Theatre

CRAIG SUGDEN

Simon Collins goes behind the scenes to meet Sean Aydon, director of a new version of Oscar Wilde’s classic tale, The Picture of Dorian Gray, touring the country, currently at the Richmond Theatre from 22nd to 27th April...

Dorian Gray is a supernatural tale about a character doomed by his headlong pursuit of worldly pleasure. Most people already know the broad outline of the original short story, first published in Lippincott’s Magazine in July 1890 then expanded by six chapters for publication as a book the following year: influenced by a dominating mentor to live just for delight, a gloriously handsome but shallow young man’s wish comes true, that only his portrait should bear the soul’s scars of sin and time while he himself, with youth untarnished, pursues a life of lip-smacking debauchery.

Around this central knot, a complex of characters circulates, notably the painter Basil Hallward and the older, cynical but witty aesthete Lord Henry Wotton, and an innocently suffering young woman. Since Lord Henry tirelessly pronounces his epigrammatic judgements on art, morals and Society in Wilde’s distinctive style it seems that character embodies the presence of the great, tragic author himself.

When I met Sean Aydon, the writer and director of this new adaptation, he appeared alarmingly young but I resisted the temptation to ask whether he kept an ageing portrait hidden in a cupboard. Instead, I got him a coffee. He trained at the Manchester School of Theatre, graduating in 2012. Since then he has performed in the theatre and on television and established the foundations of a successful career as an actor and director, including a nomination for Best Director in The Stage Debut Awards 2017.

My impression was of an easy, fluent, somewhat indeterminate personality, a quality not uncharacteristic of many actors since, after all, their profession involves becoming other people. Yet his voice is very clear and precise, his gaze focused and calm. It emerged that he thinks of himself, whether acting or directing, as a story-maker concerned to hold the attention of the audience: “It’s something I’m conscious of all the time,” he says, ”the need to control what the audience feel about certain aspects of the play, and that’s balanced with how much you want to leave open because you don’t want to close down debate.”

Aydon is not overly concerned with reverence towards the original Wilde story. He says, “It is probably better if the audience has not already read the book since then they will arrive without expectations.” He told me that not knowing the original can also give scope to the actors. “About half our cast read the novel, the others didn’t want to. In any case,” he insists, “the play’s script must have primacy since only that goes onto the stage. Only what goes in the script is real.”

I asked him what he aimed to achieve with a new version of a story that had already been adapted before. Disconcertingly, though perhaps appropriately, he replied “ambiguity.” He relishes the sort of story that is open to different interpretations. Is this a story about the vulnerability of the soul? Or the decay of youth? Or the surfaces of art? The misguidance of the cynical mentor? Or the writhing shame of homosexuality? As a director, he takes care when working with the actors to tease out complexities of character. We never see God or the Devil.

He says, “What is great is hearing audience members discussing their different views as they leave at the end, and their opinions whenever we have a Q and A, especially when school groups come who have been instructed in the required answers. They are allowed to debate. That’s what theatre should do. It’s not television.”

It may be worth recalling that Wilde’s book disgusted contemporary critics, arousing furious condemnation of the story as immoral for its perceived homoerotic stance, exciting the hostility that in a handful of years would drag the colourful Wilde into the dock at the Old Bailey, on as a convict to Pentonville and Wandsworth prisons, at last a shattered man to a cold, grim cell in Reading Gaol and his early death in Paris aged 46.

I remark to Aydon that Wilde is a writer whose personality pervades his work. There is always a great deal of strange mirroring. Basil Hallward says, “Every portrait of feeling is of the artist, not the sitter.” Aydon agrees and tells me he was guided by Wilde saying of the three main characters, Basil, Henry and Dorian, that they correspond to the different sides of his own personality: the person he wants to be, the person he presents to the world, and the person the world believes he really is. “That’s as good a guide to the play as any.”

1 of 14