The Picture of Dorian Gray

Rhoda Feng

In Kip Williams’s innovative production of Oscar Wilde’s novel, Sarah Snook takes on all twenty-six of the work’s characters
with virtuosic finesse.

Sarah Snook in The Picture of Dorian Gray. © Marc Brenner.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, adaptation written and directed by Kip Williams, the Music Box, 239 West Forty-Fifth Street, New York City, through June 15, 2025

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The primary subjects of The Picture of Dorian Gray are three: the eponymous young aristocrat; the artist Basil Hallward; and the aesthete Lord Henry Wotton. Hallward—whose attachment to his sitter is both artistic and a sublimation of the love that dares not speak its name—confesses to his friend, Lord Henry, his fear that the portrait reveals “the secret of my own soul.” Wilde, for his part, declared in a letter that he saw himself in all three characters: “Basil Hallward is what I think I am; Lord Henry is what the world thinks of me; Dorian is what I would like to be—in other ages perhaps.”

In our age, this scattering of selves has found resonant expression in director Kip Williams’s slightly modernized theatrical adaptation of Wilde’s 1891 tale. The Australian actor Sarah Snook, who won an Olivier following the show’s London run, interprets all twenty-six characters, including the titular one, who changes, over the course of the play, from a lad “unspotted from the world” into a leopard-like libertine. It is largely under the influence of Lord Henry, a Mephistophelian prince of paradoxes, that Dorian, on the cusp of adulthood, begins to pursue a sybaritic life unconstrained by anything as vulgar as scruples. Dorian’s famous wish—that he remain eternally young while his portrait ages—comes fatally true.

Sarah Snook in The Picture of Dorian Gray. © Marc Brenner.

Williams directs with a wink and a flourish, relying on an innovative “cine-theatre” approach that melds live video and prerecorded footage. In some scenes, close-ups of various characters are superimposed on one of five LED screens levitating a few meters from the floor, as when Dorian’s face shimmers over Basil’s as the latter waxes poetically about the beauty of his muse. Other times, multiple iterations of Snook share a single screen, as in a hilarious lunch party where Lord Henry presides over a table of gormless dowagers and noblemen. It’s a testament to Snook’s virtuosic range of voices and personalities that even the minor roles—an ancient housekeeper, a weary chemist—feel distinct. (The actor apparently rehearsed her lines while running on a treadmill: a fitting regimen for an astonishingly acrobatic performance.) You couldn’t ask for a better dramatization of Wilde’s claim that “man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex, multiform creature.”

Sarah Snook in The Picture of Dorian Gray. © Marc Brenner.

As if to increase Dorian Gray’s mystique, before we catch a glimpse of this multifarious individual, we meet two of his admirers: Basil and Lord Henry. To portray the latter, Snook relies on nothing more than a Surrealist mustache, a cigarette pinched between two fingers, and a brow elevated in wry amusement; then, in a matter of seconds, she is transfigured into Basil, nervously holding a paintbrush. For nearly half the show, camera operators hovering inches from Snook frame her metamorphoses while black-clad stagehands beetle about and discretely hand her a smartphone or wig and make quicksilver changes to the set. When Snook finally steps out from behind massive moving images of Dorian into a leap of light, the effect is startling, as if a bust had grown legs. She’s dwarfed by the towering screens, and this contrast—the grunt of human flesh against the hyperreality of its recorded image—gives a spine-tingling immediacy.

Sarah Snook in The Picture of Dorian Gray. © Marc Brenner.

Snook’s incarnation of Wilde’s protagonist is bewitching: her Dorian starts as a cow-eyed adolescent, haloed by a mass of beaten-gold curls; as his portrait and soul start to decompose, the dandy remains epidermically unperturbed and acquires a croissant of a quiff. Like his novelistic namesake (and creator), he’s distinguished by a fin-de-siècle love for artifice. Early on, he falls for the actress Sibyl Vane not as a woman but as a whirling constellation of all the heroines she has embodied. After the ingenue gives a wrist-slittingly bad turn as Juliet in a production of Shakespeare’s play (Snook delivers the lines in an almost farcical register) and awakens to the “reality” of life outside the theater, her parade of personalities grinds to a halt—and Dorian’s love with it. He reneges his offer of marriage; she kills herself; Dorian enters the alleyways of amorality.

The infamous portrait becomes the visible emblem of Dorian’s corruption. In this version, however, we’re never granted an audience with the picture. What we see instead are various selfies modified in real time on a smartphone and displayed on a 3.5-by-5-meter screen floating in the center of the stage. For the first image, the narrator (played by Snook, speaking in her normal voice) uses a face-beautifying app to plump up the sensualist’s lips, slim his jaw, and enlarge his eyes to cool pools. To the mirthful accompaniment of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” he embarks on what the script calls an “odyssey of the senses,” studying perfumes and fabrics, shredding an air guitar, attending costume balls, and hosting several drug-fueled parties. You all but sense the presence of a “rent-a-drip” IV lounge somewhere offstage.

Eighteen years pass in this hedonistic manner. Almost imperceptibly, the narrator shape-shifts into Dorian, who snaps another selfie and—presto!—the revised image greeting us on the center screen is hideously changed: colors run laps around their facial features, which are hardly recognizable as such. With a tap of a button on his smartphone, Dorian toggles back and forth from the glammed-up picture and its distorted twin. The play doesn’t need to venture near the baleful boulevards of likes and retweets to make us think of Dorian as a proto-influencer, uniquely gifted in the art of turning his votaries into vessels.

In large and small ways, Williams’s show tweaks Wilde’s novel for our digital age. Opium dens are figured here as a neon-drenched nightclub; the Blue Book (a kind of society directory) of nineteenth-century patricians is replaced by smartphones in the hands of idle aristos who receive Botox injections. Without breaking a sweat, the production collapses time, subtly suggesting that the sins of Dorian’s ancestors—whose scowling portraits briefly loom over the stage—persist in updated forms. (In one, Lady Devereux, Dorian’s mother, carries a Chanel shopping bag.)

The play diverges from its source in other respects, too. Antisemitic depictions of a theater manager have wisely been omitted, as have, less happily but rather inevitably, several of Wilde’s aperçus, like the famous line about how “people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Plotwise, Snook’s Dorian is now made directly responsible for the death of Sibyl Vane’s brother in a shooting-party scene remixed by Williams. This final act of murder is an act of self-defense, but what’s striking is what precedes it: as Dorian ventures into the forest, all five screens are whisked away, leaving him alone. Someone—it could be the narrator, Dorian, or a hybrid of the two—tells us that a “calm spread through his veins,” and he begins to weep. For his sins and debaucheries, yes, but also, perhaps, for belatedly realizing that the cult of beauty demands a museum’s worth of victims.

Rhoda Feng is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC.