LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Thursday, January 21, 2016

'The Picture of Dorian Gray' at Trafalgar Studios, 20th January 2016

Thursday, January 21, 2016 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Casting Dorian Gray is tricky. The story hinges on his unquestionable beauty, repeatedly described in rapturous terms by the other characters. How do you find someone to live up to that? On top of this,  we need to believe that this man is capable of acts of extreme cruelty. I've seen a couple of duff Dorian Grays over the years - most of them stumbling when the casting settled for beauty over talent.

Merlin Holland and John O'Connor at least get it right in Guy Warren-Thomas. He combines an innate purity with growing arrogance and sociopathic tendencies, eventually coalescing into a Dorian that's not just some vicarious avatar for the audience to run through their Victorian playboy indulgences, but someone genuinely worrying.

He's the best thing in the production, my favourite flourish his reaction to hearing that his spurned fiancee Sibyl Vane has killed herself: “So I have murdered Sibyl Vane, murdered her as certainly as if I had cut her little throat with a knife. And the roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden." It's the first moment in which Dorian realises that his soul is absent. Warren-Thomas plays this beautifully, simultaneously excited and disturbed at how little it's affecting him.

Perhaps it's because I've been watching and listening to a lot of David Bowie (RIP) over the last weeks, but Warren-Thomas' appearance, costumes and general demeanour strongly reminded me of his mid-70s 'Plastic Soul' style. In the mid 70s Bowie was pretty much running on cocaine (weighing just 97lb and sporting a 17in waist), while engaging in omnivorous acts of drug-fuelled predatory sexual degradation with virginal teenagers.

Indeed, in the gel-streaked debauchery sequences Dorian writhes around with Bowie-esque vigour to tripped out music, while coloured gels tossing crazy shadows across his angular features and child bearing lips. He twirls madly, sucking down opium while being caressed by a harem girl and a man in a ridiculous turban who looks like a refugee from pantomime. It's camp but effective - the woozy nightmare opium den accentuated by drug-warped voiceovers that dance on a knife-edge of cheesiness.

Warren-Thomas' Dorian feels like it's tapping into a wellspring of decadence, updating now quaint Victorian hedonism into self-centred modern fast-living. Indeed, this adaptation accentuates the homoeroticism of the text, promoting subtext to text. Holland (pleasingly (yet irrelevantly) Wilde's only grandchild) does this with the help of the original manuscript, the published version having had the more controversial passages excised. 

Facing off against this Dorian is, essentially, Oscar Wilde himself. Henry Wotton has always been a thinly veiled fictionalised Wilde, something this production amps up to maximum. Played by John Gorick, a veteran of playing Oscar Wilde, he looks, behaves and generally is the author trapped in his own story. This doppelganger factor layers on an extra slice of meaning; in the book Wotton eventually realises that Dorian is the logical conclusion of his passion for aesthetics and personal freedom and finding himself disgusted. Here, we see Wilde peering across the 20th century and finding himself alienated..

Though all this is going on under the bonnet, the surface is a neatly executed retelling of a great horror story. With four actors in multiple parts, the company decently recreates a Gothic Victorian sensibility, posing and stuffiness conceals rabid animal desires. As things crank up, Trafalgar Studios' smoke machine gets a decent workout, clouding events in an atmospheric Hammer horror fog.

Unfortunately there's a couple of flaws. It's a consciously minimalist production - a touch too austere given the focus on decadence. Another upshot of this is the often ridiculous contortions the cast must make to navigate between invisible rooms. The characters often walk across the stage, u-turn and walk back along invisible corridors. 

Also problematic are comedy peripheral characters that're played a touch too broad. I hope to god these are intentionally funny, because the cast hamming it up like pantomime dames is pretty ridiculous. Though these elements never quite spoil proceedings, they sap away seriousness and distract from the horror elements. 

This is a decent translation of a classic work, anchored by John Gorick's Wotton and boasting an effective and occasionally impressive Dorian in Warren-Thomas. While flawed, fans of Wilde won't be disappointed.

★★★

A Picture of Dorian Gray is at Trafalgar Studios until 13 February 2016. Tickets here.

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

'Dorian Gray' at the King's Head Theatre, 7th April 2015

Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

From minute one Dorian Gray is at pains to expose its own artifice. Another Soup pride themselves on their use of 'Brechtian Immersion', drawing us into Wilde's luxuriously amoral fiction while constantly reminding us that we're watching a play. From the moment we enter we're hurried by the cast to find a place to sit, the space dotted with armchairs, comfy seats and steps. I end up sitting practically in the middle of the stage, resulting in the play becoming a minor act of contortion as I crane my neck to follow the cast as they swirl about me.

At a shade under 90 minutes the script takes extreme liberties with the source material, essentially condensing it down to a series of vignettes. So we see the angelic Dorian's (Samuel Woodham) introduction to polite society, during which he's hungrily eyed by the diabolical Lord Henry Wotton (Thomas Judd). With Wotton's clawed hand comfortably resting on his shoulder, Dorian's soul begins to rot. All too soon he's a hardcore aesthete, gazing at a portrait of himself and casually selling his soul on a wish to remain forever young.

As time ticks on Dorian's corruption becomes self-sustaining. In this condensed form the night descends into a whirlwind of fragmented sin. One minute he's callously leading his would-be fiancee towards suicide, the next he's half-hearted seducing and murdering people - flicking a knife between his victim's shoulderblades as casually as he might flick a mote of dust from his suit jacket.

Much of this is conveyed through some rather Sondheim-ish songs. With Felicity Sparks on piano (with violin accompaniment by Isaac Lusher), the jagged, lightly satirical lyrics paint a portrait of an cruel world where words are lethal weapons and reputation is everything. These lyrics are spiky and fun, the entire cast (but especially Judd) taking obvious pleasure in each mannered enunciation and rhyme.

Though it's a happy coincidence, the face that Dorian Gray shares a space with In Your Face Theatre's excellent Trainspotting ends up giving this adaptation a dab more relevance. At first glance, you'd expect the heroin squat marker pen knobs and exhortations to 'Listen to the KLF!' to mildly spoil the audience's immersion. In fact, in an appropriately Brechtian twist, the artifice reminds us that the amorality of Dorian Gray isn't a Victorian aberration, more part of a continuity of cruel decadence that extends to the modern day. In Thomas Judd's opening monologue we're lectured about vice, explaining that for all our modern MDMA and heroin, the Victorians did it first (and better). Both Trainspotting and Dorian Gray take vice's destructive effects as a starting point, each exploring the corruptive influences of solipsism.

Another Soup's adaptation is at pains to emphasise the class differences between Dorian, Wotton and the working class Londoners he exploits. Most moving is the plight of Felicity Kerwin's music hall star Sybil Vane, moving amongst the audience and distributed faded flowers. Entranced by her Prince Charming, she's used up and spat out, dying an ignominious, barely regarded death. Indeed, Dorian leaves a path of destruction in his wake, and who'd suspect a face like his?

Who indeed? Filtered through the beautiful yet sphinxlike face of Samuel Woodham, Dorian appears utterly bored with both virtue and sin, blankly staring at us with dead-eyed unenthusiasm. Given that Wilde's book can easily be enjoyed as a supernatural power fantasy that lets us imagine what we might do if we were given life both eternal and free of consequences, his joylessness is disarming. 

I think Another Soup are aiming to deconstruct the idea of Dorian as prototypical Nietzschean ubermensch, connecting his predatory urges to modern day upper class sociopathy. In the high collars, tailed jackets and smug smiles there's visual echoes of the famous Bullingdon Club photos of the current government, both they and Dorian preying on those lower down the social scale and never suffering the consequences. Making Dorian beautiful but genuinely unpleasant, the audience not even allowed the sop of vicarious pleasure in his crimes, distances us from him. The effect that we examine Wilde's story coldly and critically, resisting the urge to be seduced by the beauty and glitz.

Also, this is simply a damn fun way to spend 90 minutes. Rumbling along at whipcrack pace, we're tossed like a pinball between humour, melancholy and sexual kink. My only real criticism is the mystifying decision to have Dorian's portrait remain identical to when we first see it. The characters react to it with horror, as if it's changed beyond recognition - but it's exactly the same. Maybe there's some wider point being made here, but it feels a bit cheap to build up anticipation for no reason. Still, aside from that - good times.

★★★★

Dorian Gray is at the King's Head Theatre until 12 April 2015. Tickets here.