The Picture of Dorian Gray
Sarah Snook (Photo: Marc Brenner)
By Fern Siegel (posted 4/3/25)
Oscar Wilde wrote only one novel — but “The Picture of Dorian Gray” continues to fascinate audiences with its Gothic depiction of a man so obsessed with youth and beauty, he’s willing to sacrifice his soul.
Inspired by the 1891 book, and using 21st-century technology to transmit its moral corruption to new audiences, writer/director Kip Williams has created an interesting multimedia presentation. But the real draw is Sarah Snook’s tour-de-force performance. She brilliantly plays all the characters in the adaptation at Broadway’s Music Box. It’s girl gone Wilde.
One initial drawback is the camera gimmick — also used in Sunset Blvd at the St. James — which can initially appear distracting. Are we watching the screen? Or Snook half-hidden by cameras or both? Depending on where you sit in the theater, you may not always see her.
But thanks to Snook, best known from “Succession,” the play becomes a riveting journey into vice. On seeing his glorious self-portrait, Gray makes an ominous wish: “I shall grow old, and horrible and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that I would give everything!”
Be careful what you wish for.
The setting is dandy Victorian London — though the videographers that follow Snook on stage give the production a high-tech theatricality. As she narrates the story, cameras capture her singular stage performance. Huge movie screens, pre-recorded so she’s speaking with various characters she portrays, relay the fast-paced action. This Dorian Gray owes much to Snook’s versatility and precision editing, while proving the Saki quote: “Beauty is only sin deep.”
From the exquisite-looking Dorian Gray to the effete hedonist Lord Henry Wotton (Wilde’s stand-in) to doomed lover Sybil Vane, Snook coveys the novel’s individuality, smugness, classism and narcissism with pinpoint accuracy. She inhabits each character completely, aided by Marg Horwell’s costume designs, though some of the wig choices, such as a mop of blonde curls for Dorian, are far less handsome and more clownish than Wilde imagined. The snarkiness is also an addition; the author’s original interest was aestheticism.
Yet for two nonstop hours, Snook reveals a compelling narrative as relevant now as it was then. Many of the social digs retain their power. In an age of influencers, it’s refreshing to hear Wotton claim those influenced become “an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development,” a goal clearly at odds with those blindly following others. And a well-deserved dig at the selfie-obsessed.
This imported West End production works thanks to Snook’s vitality. And though Williams’ interpretation occasionally veers from the original, which is worth re-reading, it is a clever and compelling piece.