The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray

 by Oscar Wilde at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 3rd November 2012-11-05

 adapted for the stage by Neil Bartlett Cast • Jane Brennan Lady Henry Wotton • Jasper Britton Lord Henry Wotton • Gerard Byrne Francis • Tom Canton Dorian Gray • Susannah de Wrixon Lady Narborough/ Limehouse Madam • Aaron Heffernan Victor • Bob Kelly James Vane • Emmet Kirwan Footman 1 • Andrew Macklin Alan Campbell • Charlotte McCurry Sybil Vane/Lady Monmouth • Frank McCusker Basil • Lise Ann McLaughlin Lady Agatha Carlisle • Bairbre Ní Chaoimh Mrs Erlynne/ Limehouse Prostitute • Kate O’Toole Mrs Leaf/ Mrs Vane • Ben Plunkett Reynolds Ensemble • Michael Sheehan Footman 2 • Ali White Lady Ruxton/ Limehouse Prostitute Creative Team • Neil Bartlett Director • Kandis Cook Set & Costume design • Chris Davey Lighting design • Ivan Birthistle Sound design • Vincent Doherty Sound design • Paul Kieve Additional staging by • Donal O’ Farrell 

“all art is quite useless” So ends the beginning of the prelude to Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, itself a rebuttal to the harsh critical reviews that the novel initially attracted framed mostly in terms of its putative ‘immorality’. The prelude reads like a series of haphazard, possibly disconnected aphorisms as if someone high on alcohol, laudanum or cocaine had fired off some brilliant yet meandering statements, yet they also contain indications of the novel’s power to shock for Wilde’s novel shocked and scandalised Victorian society leading to the curtailment of its original form. Suppression of the novel began with Wilde’s publisher removing some of the text without the author’s knowledge or approval and then, after the first edition had been harshly criticised, self-censorship of the text by the author who toned down the homo-erotic overtones and made some more extensive revisions of the text which, he felt, had been underwritten. 

The novel had various antecedents, the first being Faust, obviously, for Wilde himself said that an author’s first novel is about the author himself in the guise of Christ or Faust. Mephistopheles is seemingly represented by the artist Basil Hallward who offers Dorian the possibility of immortality but the meaning of art, the capture of a single moment in paint which may possibly survive far beyond the lives of those depicted, is inverted as the painting ages but Dorian fails to. A second influence is Richard Wagner’s hero Tannhauser, who eschews his mortality to be with Venus, goddess of love on the Venusburg, but then embraces mortality once again in order to confront the ordeal of experience. Wilde was influenced covertly by the writing of Huysmans. He merely alluded to a certain text that Dorian reads in the novel, but was forced to admit at the trial that the novel was A Rebours (Against Nature) by J.K.Huysmans (1848-1907). Huysman’s novel epitomises the ‘art for arts sake’ ethos of the aesthetic movement, of whom Wilde was a key representative. In the novel Huysman’s character des Esseintes seeks to create a purely aesthetic world devoid of reality in a reaction against what he regards as the horrors of bourgeois existence. Huysman’s novel influenced the Symbolist movement in literature, developing contemporaneously in France, which rejected the dominant aesthetic of naturalism embodied for Huysman’s in the work of the novelist Emil Zola. The aesthetic movement and Symbolism were a reaction to the cultural monopoly of the Establishment embodied in institutions such as The Royal Academy which had become morbidly academic and introspective, elitist, exclusive, irrelevant and unfair. It’s true that Wilde was also academic but in some pleasantly liberated or truly aesthetic sense. 

The various themes of the novel, art and morality, age and youth are neatly summarised in the triangle Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton. Lord Henry has most of the gloriously aphoristic witticisms typical of Wilde’s style. He’s aged and wrecked by a life of debauchery, hedonism and vice, lecturing Gray about youth being a depiction of perfection which vice, not just growing old, destroys. The artist Basil Hallward seeks to captivate Dorian and Lord Henry with his portrait, which is only ever a blank canvas in the play, but he’s ultimately a victim of the destructive tyranny of his own creation which is neither flesh nor blood but paint on canvas that tends towards the frailty of morality while Dorian becomes an ageless embodiment of art. This also prefigures the given theme of the novel which states that art has an ornamental, purely aesthetic function rather than a moral or didactic one. The text hovers anxiously over this aesthetic credo while wishing to function as a moral vision of Dorian who must finally account for his vices if not his sins as it becomes apparent that he is Frankenstein’s monster turning against his creator only to imply that the picture is illusory and just a representation of the character’s conscience. 

Dorian Gray, the conscienceless, amoral psychopath, destroying those around him in order that he might suspend his own palpable mortality, is also a character out of late Victorian Gothic melodrama redolent of the work of Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker. Apart from Sir Henry, Basil and Dorian the rest of the cast function as a chorus, reminiscent of Greek tragedy, that counterpoints Dorian’s rise, decline and fall, appearing at key moments in the play, acting as Dorian’s conscience. Basil Hallward is deeply moral, his portrait is the completion of a moral aesthetic that frames the actions of Dorian Gray but also seems to provide Dorian with a conscience which he disavows anyway. Dorian must kill Hallward in order to destroy any trace of conscience but this does not stop the portrait from recording Dorian’s decline. Dorian is compelled to view it again in order to realise that its record of the stains on his soul are still multiplying. The chorus returns to condemn Dorian symbolically as the truth about his eternal youthfulness becomes apparent. He has destroyed the lives of Sybil Vane, an actress whose heart he breaks, whose inability to create and re-create her performance of a swooning heroine when Dorian Gray gathers her entire life up, of Basil Hallward, marvcellously portrayed by Frank McCusker, and only Lord Henry his seeming mentor who is finally confined to a wheelchair is a friend. Dorian reveals that he murdered Hallward years ago but Lord Henry refuses to believe him, considering it to be an odd joke. Lord Henry is the epitomy of decadence and self-indulgence, espousing hedonism as a way of life, indeed he may be viewed as a representative of the Victorian philosophy of hedonism as a worldview rather than a tendency. 

Jasper Britton’s Lord Henry really sums up this silky, wretched character and Tom Canton’s Dorian Gray is beautifully athletic, slim, chic and able to summarise the charming psychopath that Dorian becomes. There is a minimal use of mise en scene, meaning stage props, decor although everyone wears period costume. The play seemed to breathe the very essence of Victorian London and this is from a reviewer who has lived in London, endured and survived it. I would recommend this play to anyone and everyone not just devotees of Oscar Wilde’s writings. 

Paul Murphy, Dublin