London ticket prices, eh? At least for £395 you get to gawp at two Hollywood stars in Plaza Suite, with Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick on high form in a sub-par play just down the road (which is sadly not paved for most of us with precious metals).
In this wildly radical, techtastic reboot of Oscar Wilde’s controversial 1891 novel, you ‘only’ get an Aussie TV star for the top-tier ticket price of £289… But after almost two breathless, breathtaking hours of this staggering one-woman tour de force with no interval, I can confirm that Sarah Snook is worth selling your own dear old ma for (sorry, mum). Why isn’t she already a major theatre star over here?
Catapulted to global fame as Succession’s devastatingly destructive Shiv, she’s just matched that with a fiercely fearless, full-throttle, utterly exposed display playing 26 characters that leaves her sweaty (and a little snotty) by the end. The rest of us simply slump gobsmacked in our seats, wondering what the hell had we just seen, and how in all the hells did she do it?
Is it a play? A multi-media marvel or a monstrosity? Wilde, himself, was no stranger to pushing boundaries and toying with the edges of our comfort zone. He also constantly questioned how we see ourselves, present ourselves to others and are in turn perceived.
The risks of fracturing the self are pitilessly exposed in Dorian Gray, the vain youth who sells his soul so a portrait may bear the evidence of his sins and ageing, leaving him eternally unblemished. Image and reality detached – sound familiar in our age of filters and insta faux-fabulousness?
Sydney Theatre Company’s artistic director Kip Williams once again directs his radical vision of Wilde’s Gothic melodrama with his full array of technical trickery. Multiple screens lower and raise, loom or sidle on. A camera team constantly films Snook on stage and off from multiple angles. She even films herself on her phone, using its apps to distort what we are seeing while she is talking.
Constant use of prerecorded footage also solves my nagging problem with one-actor shows: How do you clearly define multiple characters, and how do you present conversations when you can never show anyone reacting to another’s speech?
Snook has huge fun onstage slipping into various costumes, wigs and sideburns but she also appears onscreen as other characters in extraordinarily well-executed, fast-paced conversations with her ‘real’ self onstage. Sometimes her live-filmed stage self appears on the same screen as one or more prerecorded characters. She even sits at the end of a long table and then a full dinner party (all played by her) appear, life-sized, along the back of it. And all interact. My mind was blown.
Of course, like Andrew Scott’s divisive one-man Vanya (no technical trickery) or Nicole Scherzinger’s Sunset Boulevard (too much fourth-wall breaking camera-work) the question is always do you risk sacrificing content for concept?
Snook triumphs with magnificent characterisations. Dorian lurches from ludicrously coy coquette to sociopath and finally abject terror and self-pity. The supporting gallery of grotesques runs the gamut from dotty servants and toffs to the pitiful besotted artist Basil and sneering, smug Sir Henry. Snook deliciously revels in the airheaded actress Sybil Vane and her brutish avenging brother James.
The virtuosity of all involved from leading lady to camera operators, to sound and vision mixers is staggering. The precision of timing dialogue and hitting physical spots on stage hurts my brain.
My niggling issue is that Snook spends too much time out of sight – an overly dragged out clubbing scene ‘below’ the stage, on the other side of a wall in Dorian’s nursery, behind huge vases at a garden party – or barely in sight far upstage, blocked by the screens showing her upstage or the swirling camera crew. Sometimes we’re not sure if she is acting live but unseen or it’s prerecorded.
What’s clear is that it all roars vividly, searing to life whenever she is there talking to us or to her many other incarnations on the screens. That’s when this preposterous, delirious, disturbing fable feels bizarrely real. I was going to ruthlessly deduct one star, but then the whole point is to make us examine reality. And my poor brain start to spiral all over again.
I loved this show even as I was frustrated by it. I was fully immersed even as my mind sidetracked to wonder at the hows and whys. Best of all, and ultimately the only ‘real’ criteria for me, is that I’m utterly thrilled I saw it and its sensational leading lady.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY IS AT THE THEATRE ROYAL HAYMARKET TO MAY 11