The Picture of Dorian Gray review: Sarah Snook dazzles in a take on Wilde’s classic that’s full of surprises

Fresh from her triumph as Shiv Roy in ‘Succession’, Sarah Snook switches between 26 roles in this one-woman take on the classic novel, which sees Wilde’s doomed hero plunge into gay clubs and dance to Donna Summer

Sarah Snook in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray' (Marc Brenner)

Sarah Snook’s magnified face looms over the Haymarket’s gilded stage on a vast screen, her lips tremulous, each delicate line beneath her eyes blown up till they’re as long as a West End theatre’s toilet queue. At first, her solo attempt on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray seems like a straightforward thing: a display of acting prowess that sees the Succession star switching between 26 roles, and another exercise in vulnerability after her much-loved telly role as dowdy, deluded Shiv Roy. But like so many of Wilde’s stories, Australian director-adapter Kip Williams’s production is a surprising thing, full of magical transformations, sensory splendour and technical ingenuity.

The stage starts out bare, just a few camera-wielding technicians gliding around Snook as she narrates Wilde’s tale. We’re in late 19th-century London at its wickedest and most decadent, where handsome Dorian Gray is led astray by aphorism-dropping aesthete Lord Henry. In a fit of vanity, Dorian strikes a demonic pact where he remains forever young, while his portrait is pockmarked with the sins of his wild lifestyle. There’s always been a powerful gay subtext here, as literature’s most famous twink frequents houses of ill repute, decks himself in jewels, and manipulates the men who idolise him. But Williams literally drags out that subtext and brings it to the front of the stage, using ingenious pre-recorded footage to show Dorian plunging into glitter-curtained gay clubs in place of the original novel’s opium dens, energised by a pulsing Donna Summer soundtrack.

There would have been an argument for casting a queer star here, to bring out the connections between the Victorian and 21st-century gay undergrounds. But Snook nonetheless rises to the challenge, looking wonderfully at home as she lounges camply on a chaise longue encrusted in lavish flowers. She brings just the right balance of archness and real, felt intensity to her endless succession of roles. Dorian has a fluttering Princess Diana-esque vulnerability that congeals into toughness, Snook swapping a blonde curly wig for a hard platinum quiff. Soon, Dorian is facetuning his features through smartphone filters, smudging away imperfections with an adeptness that Victorian makeup-mongers could only dream of.

His world is full of friends, lovers and domestics who, in a masterstroke from Williams and video designer David Bergman, appear alongside him on a multilayered succession of screens. The stage becomes a hall of mirrors, full of dozens of iterations of Snook’s face appearing above sumptuous velvet gowns, frilled aprons or starched collars furnished by the teeming imagination of designer Marg Horwell. It’s all an artful comment on Dorian’s own vanity, and the way that his self-obsession makes the rest of the world thin and two-dimensional.

Snook plays all 26 roles in the production (Marc Brenner)

But this production’s masterstroke is to make sure that all this artificiality can fall away when it needs to. There’s a real palpable terror to the forest scenes, where Dorian is confronted by his own mortality, suddenly unprotected by the soothing upholstery of upper-class drawing room respectability. Somehow, Snook manages to convey an elemental, sweat-drenched desperation even as camera operators wheel around her and screens loom above her head. This is raw, human misery, only heightened by the artifice that surrounds it. It’s a neat visual encapsulation of the gilded prison that Wilde’s novel creates, gorgeous and suffocating all at once. 

Theatre Royal Haymarket, until 11 May