EGN NEWS DESK
A big, rectangular display hangs from the highest of the stage on the Theater Royal Haymarket in London. It is, somewhat appropriately, in portrait mode.
Beneath it, the Australian actress Sarah Snook (“Succession,” “Run Rabbit Run”), sporting a Johnny Bravo-style blonde quiff, is circulated by a small workforce of black-clad digicam operators who broadcast her each transfer onto the display in actual time as she concurrently narrates and performs the title position of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”
Later, a number of extra screens descend, enjoying prerecorded footage of Snook in no fewer than twenty-five different roles. Over the course of the subsequent two hours, the onstage Snook interacts seamlessly with these digitalized selves. There are not any different actors concerned.
Wilde’s 1890 novel, through which a good-looking rake makes a Faustian cut price with the cosmos by buying and selling his soul for everlasting youth (and involves remorse it), lends itself to stage adaptation: It is dialogue-heavy, punctuated by witty, morally clever exposition; its allegory of human hubris is timeless.
This adaptation, by the Sydney Theater Company, directed by Kip Williams and working by means of May 11, is a formally bold however playful multimedia manufacturing. The single-actor format and intelligent use of camerawork give visible expression to the novel’s themes of overweening egotism and existential dread.
In the present’s most memorable scene, Snook holds up a smartphone in selfie mode, which is synced to the large display above her. While persevering with to relate the story, she performs round with a filter, altering her facial options to generate a a lot youthful visage — a cartoonish parody of youthful sexiness. She then capriciously turns the filter on and off a number of instances, heightening the distinction with bizarre scrunched-up faces when the filter is off. This phase, with its implicit allusion to the on a regular basis narcissism of Instagram tradition, brings Wilde’s story into our century.
Snook performs the male characters with a winkingly ironic haughtiness, drawing appreciative titters from the viewers. Her Dorian is a caricature of self-regard, inviting judgment but in addition eliciting mirth; when his delight offers solution to anxious ennui, he’s like a rat trapped in a maze. (The voices are naturally difficult, however the pretend sideburns go a great distance.)
The aesthetic palate here’s a mix of interval and modern — by some means neither and each. While sure props evoke a fin-de-siècle opulence — a chaise longue coated in flowers, a set of luscious blue curtains — we’re sometimes yanked again to a generic modernity: An opium den is rendered as a nightclub; the distinctive strains of Donna Summer’s 1977 hit, “I Feel Love,” soundtrack one scene.
There can also be one thing vaguely tongue-in-cheek about a lot of the interval garb, by Marg Horwell. Dorian’s libertine good friend, Lord Henry Wotton, who eggs him on in his hedonistic endeavors, wears a purple jacket with a blue bow tie. At one level, he and the Duchess of Monmouth obtain Botox injections whereas languidly sipping on Martinis and dragging on cigarettes.
The present’s true stars are the manufacturing workforce — and, particularly, the video designer, David Bergman — who achieved the feat of constructing this one-woman present really feel positively busy. Crucially, the multimedia format doesn’t really feel like a gimmick as a result of it helps tease out the play’s themes: Vanity and its accompanying psychic turmoil are each evoked by means of relentless use of maximum close-ups, and the a number of screens create a way of visible cacophony that correlates to psychological disturbance.
Gradually, Dorian’s horrible habits — most egregiously, his therapy of poor Sibyl Vane, who takes her personal life after he cruelly breaks off an engagement together with her — catches up with him, culminating in a robust denouement, through which 5 screens present Dorian from a number of angles whereas he writhes in anguish.
Multimedia productions can typically carry a whiff of self-importance, however this present is disarmingly playful. There are two fake glitches, through which the onstage Snook and her prerecorded self get in one another’s method, narrating the identical traces concurrently. (The latter graciously offers method, which is how we could be certain it’s scripted.)
Dorian’s knifing of Basil Hallward, the hapless artist accountable for the titular portray, is rendered in darkly comedian vogue, with Snook pausing between stabs to examine herself in a hand mirror. Shortly afterward, she alerts to the viewers to mood their laughter: “I’m attempting to get away with homicide!”
This “Picture of Dorian Gray” is, by itself phrases, a triumph. And but, a little bit of doubt stays. The technical wizardry enhances the story — however does it additionally overshadow it? The eye is at all times drawn upward, to the display, such that the bodily presence of the actor feels nearly incidental. One suspects that many viewers members at such a manufacturing are by no means absolutely within the story.
Instead of pondering the ethical vicissitudes of life, we’re serious about the screens, and the novelty of being in a hallowed auditorium relationship again to 1821, digital faces as an alternative of flesh-and-blood individuals. It works, with Wilde’s materials — however I hope it doesn’t catch on.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Through May 11 on the Theater Royal Haymarket in London; trh.co.uk
