Does Sarah Snook’s one-woman take on Oscar Wilde’s Faustian tale confirm the inexorable rise of celebrity-led theatre? It follows fast in the glittery footsteps of Andrew Scott’s one-man Vanya, and Eddie Izzard’s Great Expectations. Is this the West End’s direction of travel? Possibly. But if the result is this tinglingly virtuoso and startlingly dangerous then I welcome canonical solo vehicles with the mischievous, swaggering and operatic Snook at their helm.
At first, it seems staged in the same vein as Vanya, reliant on Snook to create the effects. She grabs a paintbrush to play the earnest artist, Basil, who creates the portrait enabling Dorian Gray to stay fatally young, and then dons a pink smoking jacket for the devilish Sir Henry, whose invisible smoke-rings she draws with a twirling finger. Dorian is conjured in a few gestural tics (a boyish smirk, a giggle) and an angelic wig so he appears rather like Peter Shaffer’s Mozart in Amadeus. But where Vanya remained lo-fi, this “cine-theatre” production is technologically elaborate in its imagination.
Originally adapted in 2020 by Sydney Theatre Company’s artistic director, Kip Williams, who again directs, the result is a true high-wire act, not only because of Snook’s fleet and fabulous performance but also because of the accompaniment of screens, pre-recorded footage, live film crew, and orchestration of technology that is as dazzling as it is complicated, heightening theatricality rather than distracting from it.
There are moments when a camera is pressed up against Snook’s face so closely we see every pore, and others when there are seven replicated versions of her. It goes from a clever, daring game, schlocky and over-acted (Snook variously writhes, dances and bursts into lip-synced song in what seems like an experimental cabaret) to something far more serious and accomplished.
It is a juggling act of high order for Snook. She must perform in real time, react to the recorded footage and manipulate the technology herself in some scenes. She speaks in dialogue but also narrates omnisciently. Some scenes require athleticism, others sudden stillness. It demands an exacting synchronicity and she gets it pitch perfect, powering through 26 characters.
Snook’s recent screen role as the unlikable, driven Shiv Roy in Succession gives her the perfect springboard for inhabiting Wilde’s murderously unlikable protagonist. Her Dorian is archly comic at first, as if a parody, but gets harder and enters into the tragic by the end.
The many moving screens spur the drama, aiding its overt construction and always remain in service to the story’s themes. Dorian’s many projected, fractured, selves suggest that this story might just be a narcissistic fantasy, rather like Bret Easton Ellis’s Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, literally projected on to the screens before us. It plays with Wilde’s idea that the “I” is an elaborate fantasy and that this has all been a bad trip as Snook snorts a line and knocks back the champagne: “This is not real,” Dorian whispers.
We stay within Wilde’s original period setting but the current world is folded inside it. Dorian’s painting is horribly airbrushed with Instagram technology, while Jimmy Somerville’s I Feel Love accompanies his hedonist entry into queer subculture.
In a story full of philosophical rumination on beauty, Marg Horwell’s set and costumes are ravishing too, so vivid that they accentuate the sense of a garish fantasy being played out.
It is all beautiful, brilliant, maniacally unmissable.
