Why “pictures”? Just as in Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel, there is, in Lucy Shaw’s adaptation, only one portrait that mysteriously reveals the “leprosies of sin” that rot the soul of Dorian Gray, even as his physical form stays young and beautiful. (William Reynolds’s design frames water, lit by coloured lights, in a catafalque-like box, suggesting stagnation, refraction, reflection and distortion.) What gives the title its plural – and the production its singularity – is the multiplicity of its possible presentations.
Director Tom Littler presents the text in four variations. Depending on which you see, the gender of characters will or will not have been swapped. On the night I went, Dorian was played by Helen Reuben as a young woman led into dissolution by Augustina Seymour’s Lady Henry. Sybil Vane, the actor destroyed by Dorian’s cruel rejection, was presented by Richard Keightley as an adolescent boy. Only Stanton Wright’s Basil, the portraitist who, in striving to capture Dorian, achieves more than he realises, is gendered as in the original. In a programme note, Littler explains that there is no particular point to the reassignments, just a desire to pose the question: how and why does a character seem different if it is a woman or a man?
Shaw’s writing also suggests the shape-shiftingness of identity. Actors are narrators as well as characters; now in role, now relating the action or echoing fragments of leitmotif Wilde lines (“to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul,” for instance).
This conceptual approach is intriguing and offers some fine moments but, ultimately, it sags as drama – a sketch of Wilde’s story rather than its portrait.
• Pictures of Dorian Gray is at Jermyn Street theatre, London, until 6 July, then touring
