The Picture of Dorian Gray/Girls and Boys
Adelaide Festival
Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn
After completing my undergraduate studies at the University of Upper Flügelhorn I spent some years at Cambridge doing my doctoral thesis on the later Wittgenstein and the paraphenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Paraphänomenologie den Sprachspielen) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s former student, translator and literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ includes the statement that the first-person pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. On my arrival at Cambridge I played the role of Lord Henry Wotton in a student production of The Picture of Dorian Gray, concealing my Austrian accent and relishing the opportunity to embody Wilde’s most famous villain.
Many years later after emigrating to Australia I saw a definitive production of The Importance of Being Earnest by British touring company Ridiculusmus at the Malthouse Theatre in 2006 in which two actors played all the roles, changing costumes onstage and sometimes playing multiple roles in the same scene. So you can imagine how excited I was to see the Sydney Theatre Company production of Dorian Gray remounted at His Majesty’s Theatre for the Adelaide Festival, directed and adapted by Kip Williams with Erin Jean Norville playing all the roles, interacting with herself using live and pre-recorded video, and wearing a variety of costumes, wigs and facial hair.
David Bergman’s interactive video design and Marg Horwell’s dynamic set use video and screens to reflect the narcissism at the heart of the story. The footage (which is mostly live) is projected onto huge screens rising and falling from the flies, like stage scenery in a classic Victorian theatre (in fact the recently refurbished His Majesty’s is the last surviving Edwardian relic from what was once the national Tivoli vaudeville circuit). All this has the effect of incorporating video technology into the circuit of living presence and live action that is the essential medium of theatre. In contrast with many productions in which video kills the show, here I felt like I was watching the revenge of theatre on the ubiquity of the screen: a most gratifying reversal.
Norville’s performance is a virtuosic tour de force which manages to engage us emotionally (despite the mechanics of the staging and plot, and the variously moral or intellectual vacuousness of the characters) because of her energy, sense of comedy and capacity to make us care about Dorian (who is little more than a cipher in Wilde’s original) by taking us with him on a convincing journey from charming idiocy to selfish manipulation, existential dread and the incipient stirrings of conscience, until the final self-destructive dénouement. Norville is also credited as a dramaturg and creative associate on the production, and she brings a vital sense of agency to the performance, which is also key to the show’s success.
She’s supported in this by a phenomenal (or perhaps paraphenomenal) team of mechs (I counted thirteen during the curtain call) who hurtle about the vast bare stage with cameras, costumes, props and miniature sets on wheels, and who add a sense of ensemble to the storytelling. One of my favourite moments involved one of them rushing centre-stage to rectify a chair than had accidentally fallen over after being too-hastily set, before dashing back upstage to take up their position with camera poised. This sense of humanity (made all the more visible through imperfection) was if anything reinforced by the occasional vocal stumble, as well as two deliciously scripted moments of hesitation between Norville and one of her onscreen avatars as to who has the next line.
There’s an underlying queerness (as with Earnest) shared by the production and the text which is heightened by having a woman play all the (mostly male, mostly gay) roles. The script also restores (unless my ears or memory deceived me) certain homoerotic passages in the original that were later cut or rewritten by Wilde under pressure from his publishers, including references to the artist Basil Hallward’s relationship with Dorian which inescapably call to mind Wilde’s similarly tragic relationship with Alfred Douglas.
That said, Williams and Norville’s Dorian Gray is above all a glorious romp that gleefully sheds the gloomy Late Victorian Gothic trappings of the original. In fact Horwell’s design is splendidly colourful as well as playful: the camp frippery of wigs, facial hair, and costumes is augmented by smouldering cigarettes, huge ornamental vases of flowers (which double as onscreen gardens), miniature puppet shows, life-size rocking horses and an onscreen gallery of famous portraits from art history whose faces are replaced with Norville’s own – a brilliant conceit that links the practice of selfies with the history of portraiture, as well as taking literally the painter Hallward’s remark that every portrait is in fact a self-portrait of the artist, no matter its ostensible subject. This conceit is taken further when Dorian begins digitally altering his selfie on a smart phone and his face changes correspondingly in the images and footage on the screens; it’s surely no coincidence that the most grotesque of these distortions bears more than a passing resemblance to Donald Trump, thanks to the bouffant blond wig and twisted smirk. Conversely, the titular portrait of Dorian never appears: the denial of mortality in the story extending from the function of the portrait to that of the photo in what Walter Benjamin presciently called the age of mechanical reproduction – or to the digital image in what my old friend Baudrillard described as the era of simulation.
The coup de théâtre is the momentary disappearance of the screens when they ascend into the flies and are replaced by massive descending three-dimensional stage tree trunks, when Dorian flees into the forest where he finds himself briefly alone for the only time in the story, just before his encounter with the hare that he recognises as his true signifier (and which like the portrait we do not see). This irruption of the real into the imaginary (as my former analyst might have said) is however all-too-brief; the screens return, and Dorian finally meets his fate, staring out into the audience, and then back into the screen-mirror that devours him in a final blackout.
The progression from Brechtian minimalism to carnivalesque pantomime to Dantesque hell is supported by Clemence Williams’ sound design, which offers an aural smorgasbord of classical and contemporary soundbites from Schumann to Donna Summer's I Feel Love to the soundtrack of Under the Skin, underpinned by a delicate original score that connects us by a fragile thread to Dorian’s tormented soul. Nick Schlieper’s masterful lighting manages to navigate the demands of the rising and falling screens, mobile mini-sets, and moving targets of Norville’s body and ever-changing face. But in the realm of the hyperreal, in the end there is nothing under the skin.
*
I hope it won’t seem invidious to compare Dorian Gray with another, less extravagant but no less potent one-woman show in the Festival, which is more narrowly focussed on gender (and more specifically toxic masculinity): the State Theatre Company of South Australia’s production of Girls and Boys by British playwright Dennis Kelly, directed by Mitchell Butel and starring Justine Clarke.
I’m reluctant to say too much about the plot, because there’s a huge shift in tone halfway through which depends for its effectiveness on the audience not knowing what’s coming. Indeed this not-knowing is essential to our shared experience of shock with that of the protagonist, who’s still processing what’s happened to her. Moreover the impact of the shock and the aftermath of its processing are essential to the subject matter and form of the play, which is not simply an act of storytelling or remembering, but an attempt to understand and recover from the inconceivable.
Kelly’s writing is incredibly skilful at drawing us in, and drawing things out, and drawing connections; and afterwards I found myself going over what I’d heard or seen, and hearing or seeing things differently. An anecdote or action early in the play takes on another significance later; as it does for the unnamed Woman who's repeating and reliving it.
Justine Clarke’s performance here is as much of a tour-de-force as Norville’s in Dorian Gray, and has a great a range, but this is a much more subtle, nuanced, and detailed portrait. Like Wilde’s story, the play is set in London but really it could be almost any city in the world (the British accent was fine but seemed unnecessary, except as an indicator of class). Unlike Dorian Gray, the set (designed by Ailsa Paterson and moodily lit by Nigel Levings) never changes: a living room with a collection of furniture downstage and an array of toys and other household objects in shelves upstage, framed on three sides by a series of colourful archways, almost like a cloister. I found the archways and clutter of the set and some of the shifts in lighting unnecessary and a little distracting – all I wanted was to focus on Clarke and imagine everything else. I was similarly distracted by the degree to which she seemed compelled to move around the set and ‘act things out’ (physically and emotionally) almost to the degree of miming the presence of other invisible characters. To be sure this had a pay-off later in terms of the ‘reveal’; but I wondered if the ‘acting out’ needed to be so literal.
Nevertheless once the play reached its turning point I was utterly rivetted by the writing and performance. Once or twice the storytelling seemed to move too quickly, and I almost wanted to interrupt and ask for more details or explanations; and towards the end the storyteller’s observations and conclusions seemed a little glib; but even these glitches and short-circuits seemed to be part and parcel of the character and her situation.
In many ways, Girls and Boys makes a fascinating companion piece to After Kreutzer, another work in the Festival about gender and toxic masculinity (reviewed by my colleague Humphrey Bower in Limelight at https://limelightmagazine.com.au/reviews/after-kreutzer-anna-goldsworthy-and-andrew-haveron-adelaide-festival/ ). One can only hope that Wilde was wrong when he wrote in the Preface to Dorian Gray that all art is quite useless.
‘O Mensch,’ as Zarathustra spoke:
O Mensch! Gib acht!
Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?...
Tief ist ihr Weh.
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