Eryn Jean Norvill, trailed by several stage hands and three camera operators, walks onstage and sits behind a rectangular screen that hangs vertically at the centre of the stage. The crowd falls into an instant hush. The screen comes to life and we see Norvill as the camera does — luminous in white and blonde against the black.
She begins: “The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses …” Norvill as narrator describes Sir Henry Wotton smoking and, from off-screen, she is handed a lit cigarette. She turns to a second camera, the screen flits to the new angle, as she takes on Wotton’s languid, faintly villainous purr. She turns to a third camera, and as she does so drops her right hand and raises her left, holding a paintbrush. Now she is the fussy and open-hearted painter Basil Hallward, her voice and demeanour shifting in a moment.
Thus opens The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which a young man of uncommon beauty effectively sells his soul so that his portrait will wear his age and moral degradation while he stays pristine — physically, at least. If the opening sounds like a high-wire act of performance, production and stagecraft, well, that’s the least of it. It’s a one-woman show in which Norvill plays 26 characters, via costume changes, interactions with footage of herself, sprints from one section of set dressing to another, and an array of iPhone filters.
It is a two-hour Rube Goldberg construction: relentless kinetic art, dazzling sleight of hand. The energy, the control, the sheer internal metronome — Norvill’s demonstration is dizzying to contemplate. She recites long passages of Oscar Wilde’s lyrical prose, and we tense up, knowing that if she’s a second off, a character screen behind her will cut in. It never happens, though they have fun with the possibility.
This is Norvill’s first performance with the Sydney Theatre Company since she was the star witness against actor Geoffrey Rush in his defamation trial against The Daily Telegraph, which had threatened to derail the Me Too movement (such as it was) in Australia. It’s impossible not to see significance in the choice of author. Within a few years of the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray, his only novel, Oscar Wilde would be destroyed by a vicious and highly public libel case that served as an X-ray for the hypocrisy and double standards of Victorian society.
And the form seems significant — the myriad screens split Gray the character and Norvill the actor like light through a prism, the self smashed into shards by the weight of sudden notoriety. But then, this is also the book that necessitated a preface insisting, “to reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim”.
That’s the whole problem with reviewing a show like this — it resists, it pirouettes away from the writer’s grasp as surely as Norvill swings from one camera to another.
It seemed inevitable, as the trial unfolded, that the Tele‘s reckless reporting regarding Rush’s allegedly inappropriate behaviour against Norvill during STC’s 2015 production of King Lear would destroy her career as surely as his. While finding that Norvill presented as an “intelligent, articulate and confident witness who was endeavouring to give an honest recollection of the events in question”, Justice Wigney questioned her credibility on certain matters and was utterly scathing towards the Tele, calling the report “excessive and sensationalist”. Rush was awarded a record $2.87 million in damages.
Norvill hadn’t wanted to go public with her complaint; she had simply wanted her employer to know about a co-worker who was allegedly making her feel uncomfortable. Unfortunately, large parts of the Me Too culture, in Australia and elsewhere, have frequently told women who make allegations about powerful men: “Thank you, and now enjoy your lifetime of never working again.”
Whatever else it is, The Picture of Dorian Gray, this career-high tour de force written specifically for Norvill by Kip Williams, is a gigantic “fuck you” to all that.
