Wickedness has seldom been made to seem quite so dull as it is in this inept staging of Oscar Wilde’s great novella about a young man who sells his soul in return for eternal youth. Dorian keeps his portrait, painted by the lovelorn Basil Hallward, hidden in the attic, where over the years it bears the ravages of his corruption while his own face remains untouched and as exquisite as an angel. But this plodding version by Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland (written with John O’Connor) has all the vices of a page-to-stage adaptation and none of the virtues that we’ve seen over recent years with reinventions of the form by Sally Cookson, Simon Stephens and others.
As some previous productions have triumphantly proved, Wilde’s novel – with its examination of life and art, the beautiful and the ugly and its emphasis on the dark and tawdry realities hiding beneath glittering surface appearances – is ripe for theatrical reinvention. Its duality suits the theatre. After all, Dorian himself is so enchanted by the teenage actress Sybil Vane on stage that he fails to understand that he has fallen in love with an illusion – just as we all suspend our disbelief and allow ourselves to be seduced by the artfulness of theatre.
There’s no suspension of disbelief and precious little artfulness in this production by Peter Craze that has a perfunctory design and is barely competent in its use of doubling, or even how it gets the furniture and actors on and off the stage. The quartet of actors work hard but all are miscast to a greater or lesser degree. Their uneasiness, in an evening that offers the bare bones of the story but none of its meat, shows in the way that they fall upon each epigram like starving travellers who have suddenly spied a chicken nugget in an interminable desert wasteland.
- At Trafalgar Studios 2, London, until 13 February. Buy tickets at theguardianboxoffice.com or call 0330 333 6906.
