Sarah Snook gives an impressive tour de force of a performance in Kip Williams’ busy and basically anti-Wilde adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Williams has 26 characters in his script and Snook plays them all, many through technological tricks that allow her to play off herself in several roles, as screens show her pre-filmed portrayals of peripheral characters in the familiar story of a young man who wishes for his own portrait to age while he remains young—which happens to his initial enjoyment but later madness.

 

Using onstage cameras and onscreen video has been on our stages for awhile now, with varying degrees of success or irritation by the likes of Ivan van Hove. Williams joins the fray with his willing and able accomplice—for nearly two hours, Snook jumps in and out of various clothes, shoes, facial hair, wigs, accents. Williams’ staging would seem to be the perfect way to visualize Wilde’s themes of the meaning of art and beauty as well as the perils of vanity and narcissism. 

 

Indeed, it’s initially great fun to watch Snook morph into the selfish young Dorian, the principled painter Basil Hallward and the pleasure-seeking Lord Henry, among many others. It’s also entertaining to watch the behind-the-scenes quick changes occur right onstage with the agile assistance of a half-dozen crew members who brandish cameras as well as paraphernalia Snook uses onstage like a cigarette or drink. 

 

But that fun soon wears out its welcome and the show becomes trying, even enervating at times, as Williams favors cleverness and technology over the elegance and terrifying clarity of Wilde’s story. As bodies start piling up while Dorian indulges in every manner of hedonism and his portrait grows progressively more hideous to mirror his lifestyle, there’s very little of Wilde’s thematic cohesiveness that culminates in a perfectly pitched ironic ending. Instead, we watch Snook alternately overact and underplay several characters as crew members run around the stage with their cameras.

 

The opening shows Snook quickly becoming several characters in front of our eyes—and the cameras—but that’s merely a tease as the rest of the play pairs the onstage performer with her onscreen image, reaching its apex (or nadir) when several onscreen Snooks attend a dinner party alongside the stage performer. Williams and his talented crew have turned a classic piece of 19th-century Gothic horror into a buzzy 21st-century event, where everything that still makes Wilde’s story hauntingly relevant has been replaced by the superficial pleasures that are Dorian’s downfall.