Dorian Gray Portrayed In Scarborough

This adaptation, by Lucy Shaw, of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, is played out in the dark for the most part, we the audience like squinting voyeurs not quite sure if our eyes are deceiving us. Yet it throws considerable light on the author’s only novel, coming across like, well, who knows, let’s say the Aesthetic Movement’s Edgar Allan Poe-faced treatment of the Faust legend. Scandal and Oscar were very close bed fellows and the book on its appearance caused public outrage since beyond a shadow of a doubt behind the Art for Art’s sake façade was a criticism of conventional morality.

Played with dazzling bombast, young and old, by Richard Keightley, it is tempting to confuse the role of Lord Henry Wotton, who exerts a far from benign influence on young Dorian, as Wilde himself. Certainly he speaks in that devilishly clever Wildean way, wielding the mocking ironies, witty paradoxes and seductive subtleties that we know so well from the lips of Oscar’s leading male stage characters.

Stanton Wright is immense, proud, peacockish, Puckish, in the eponymous role, as ultimately the tragic character, superficially blessed but with a fatal flaw. We witness Dorian Gray, his very name suggesting gilded dross, being debauched by the older man, his head turned, arrogance, self-conceit, vanity, narcissism, being nurtured by flattery delivered in honeyed tones, the words poisonous in their effect but sweet sounding. Without this induction into what - to be blunt - is presumably the hedonistic late-nineteenth-century gay demi-monde, it is doubtful Dorian would have sought and made his Faustian bargain with the devil that will keep him eternally young but increasingly desperate.

It is a quest for the impossible, true human artistic perfection, that makes him cruelly turn his back on the lovely young actress Sibyl Vane (Augustina Seymour) the moment she asserts her real self as opposed to her stage persona, and shun the artist, Basil Hallward (Helen Reuben). Sweetly enamoured of Dorian, Basil comes to believe that his painting of him is the apotheosis of his career; nothing he will ever create will be remotely comparable. In a sense he’s right because the gilded portrait, which is here represented symbolically as something like Narcissus’s pool, has magical qualities: it records Dorian’s face as it should have naturally developed with the ravages of time. Only by looking at it can he see his real self, wrinkles, burst veins, warts and all.

Played out in the intimate surroundings of the McCarthy Studio, this unmissable production from Jermyn Street Theatre, directed by Tom Littler, crackles with pace, verve, raw energy, using an array of intensely physical techniques and sound effects to create a darkly voyeuristic, wholly immersive experience. It’s shocking, thrilling, disturbing, by turns, as we witness blackmail and bloodshed, wander though an opium den, encounter things of which we would rather remain innocent. We go home, our emotions fully cathartic, convinced we have glimpsed something rare, perhaps the play Oscar never wrote and which if he had would not have been staged.

But there’s more to be said and seen. There are four different versions of the play in the week it is in Scarborough, with the actors swapping roles, so that on Tuesday, 28th of May, we find a male Dorian paired with a female Wotton; on the 29th, a female Dorian with a male Wotton; and on the 30th a female Dorian with a female Wotton.

Oscar Wilde’s Pictures of Dorian Gray is at the SJT, Scarborough until 31st May (2019).