The Picture of Dorian Gray, Haymarket Theatre, London
Well, if you happen to thought this is likely to be an opportunity to catch the actual Siobhan Roy, or slightly the actual Sarah Snook, unmediated by a movie crew (as she is in TV’s Succession), you then’d be fallacious.
No, rather more thrilling than that, it’s an opportunity to see Snook wrestling with a high-tech theatrical monster in a daring, visually beautiful and eventually exhausting adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Nineteenth-century novel.
Playing 26 characters from the e-book – and presenting them within the model of an artwork gallery video set up — it is a present that’s as sensible in its conception as it’s mesmerising in its execution.
Playful and critical, it reinvents Wilde’s Jekyll and Hyde story of a younger socialite at first freed, after which tormented, by a portrait that retains him wanting younger.
Snook is serviced like a Formula One racing driver by a staff of crack stage arms and movie crew, deftly and speedily becoming her with cigs, wigs, and facial hair.
Sarah Snook as Dorian, one of many 26 characters the actress performs throughout the manufacturing of The Picture Of Dorian Gray at Haymarket Theatre, London
The adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s story includes a kaleidoscope of canvases and high-tech results
She turns to completely different cameras, presenting completely different characters in varied roll-on, roll-off fin-de-siecle society London settings.
And all that’s relayed to a kaleidoscope of canvases, shifting throughout the stage like gigantic display screen savers. Inevitably, there are moments whenever you catch Snook’s well-known Shiv in close-up – the recoil, the wince and the sceptical facial squeeze.
But it is a distinctive virtuoso efficiency, matching Wilde’s love of artifice along with her personal gender-fluid tackle the story that’s (concern not) by no means trite or woke. Instead, it’s by turns intense, mischievous, elegant and grotesque.
She begins in impartial: hooded, snake-green peepers, eyeing us from beneath a neo-Thatcherite perm.
And then she cunningly mutates into the gorgeous boy socialite Dorian – successful fun with a curly Marilyn wig and stick-on whiskers, set off by a pink velvet coat.
Amusingly, she winds up wanting like a blonde, corseted Elvis… after a two-hour work-out within the fitness center. One excessive level is a cocktail party, that includes Snook dressed as six high-society gargoyles – together with one with a lap canine sniffing at her ankles.
But her actual performing chops go into the 2 predominant characters: Dorian’s smirking mentor Henry, who despatches a few of Wilde’s best aphorisms (‘It is not good for one’s morals to see unhealthy performing’); and the proficient however fearful artist pal Basil, who paints the dreaded portrait.
Kip Williams’ manufacturing, first seen in 2020 in Snook’s native Australia (starring Eryn Jean Norvill) augments the illusions with one other avatar of Snook popping up behind her military of characters as a photo-bombing narrator.
But additionally woven by the present is music – starting from Donna Summer to Handel, Vivaldi and Mahler – including pulse, magnificence and melancholy.
The need of an interval does make it laborious work over the 2 hours, and a chase by woodland on the finish has the texture of cod-Victorian melodrama within the model of Benny Hill.
But that is an distinctive and strange piece of labor that additionally presents Snook’s Dorian as a prototype TikTok influencer – enhancing her face on a cell phone for plumper lips, longer lashes and bionic eyebrows – and bringing this cautionary story bang updated, in type and content material.