The Picture of Dorian Gray: a 'chameleonic tour de force' from Sarah Snook

The Week UK
·2 min read
Sarah Snook as one of the 26 characters in Kip Williams's adaptation of "Picture of Dorian Grey".
Sarah Snook as one of the 26 characters in Kip Williams's adaptation of "Picture of Dorian Grey".
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Standing ovations are "ten-a-penny" in the theatre these days, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. "But I've never seen one as swift or unanimous as that which greeted Sarah Snook" at the end of this show. And for once, it "seemed fully justified".

In Kip Williams's stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde's novel, the Australian actress (one of the stars of TV's "Succession") inhabits all 26 characters. Her every move is filmed by an onstage team of camera operators, and we see her in dizzying close-up on an array of screens. She also interacts live with pre-recorded screen versions of herself – as the sinister Lord Henry Wotton, the besotted artist Basil Hallward, the hapless actress Sibyl Vane and so on.

It could all be too tricksy, but the "head-spinning magic is that your disbelief is richly suspended": this is a "chameleonic tour de force" from a performer of "exceptional pluck and mercurial power".

Wilde’s gothic tale – about a man who retains his "exquisite" looks while his portrait becomes a grotesque record of his descent into gluttony, lechery and worse – has been cleverly repackaged for our own age, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times. This sizzling adaptation asks questions about our obsession with self image, and the "slipperiness of self", while playing "intelligently with art and artifice, essence and appearance". Which is the true Dorian? And which is the true Snook? The one on stage, or the one projected on screen?

The technical wizardry serves the drama, rather than distracting from it, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. And Snook's performance is "tinglingly virtuoso". "It is all beautiful, brilliant, maniacally unmissable."

Yet if you look at the ticket prices, you'll find you may have to miss it, said Clive Davis in The Times. Seats in the stalls are £250 or more – a lot for a show that is good but a bit thin, more style than substance. With "Plaza Suite" (starring Sarah Jessica Parker) charging similarly crazy prices, it seems a "kind of designer-label madness has taken root" in the West End.

Theatre Royal Haymarket, London SW1 (020 7930 8800, trh.co.uk). Until 11 May