In The Picture of Dorian Gray, our protagonist is gripped by a “passion for impossible things”. Theatre, too, seems caught in a similar mania. Andrew Scott’s eight roles in Vanya not being enough, nor Eddie Izzard’s 19 in Great Expectations, Sarah Snook now plays 26 in a head-spinning adaptation of the Oscar Wilde novel.
It begins with Snook walking on to the black, cavernous, undressed stage and taking a seat surrounded by several cameras. Her face appears in huge and intimate detail on a central screen suspended from the ceiling. At first, it seems the production will follow Vanya’s lead, using props and slight physical and vocal shifts to indicate different characters: Snook quivers and clutches a paintbrush as Basil Hallward, who is working on a portrait of one Dorian Gray, and sneers and fingers a cigarette as the hedonistic aristocrat Lord Henry Wotton.
New Statesman
