Playing to the Camera

The Tony Awards for excellence in Broadway Theatre were announced last week, and it was pleasing to see an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray among the nominees.

The production is currently enjoying a limited engagement at Music Box theatre on W 45th St. in New York, after transferring from a successful run in London’s West End where it won two Olivier Awards. The Tonys are Broadway’s equivalent awards and ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ received six nominations—including Best Performance by an Actress (Sarah Snook), and Best Direction (Kip Williams).

It is a truly remarkable staging of the work, and as a segue into what makes it remarkable, it is worth alluding to a little known Oscar Wilde-related parallel in the history of the Tony Awards.

In the first year of the Tonys¹ back in 1947, (Sir) John Gielgud brought his London production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest to Broadway, at the Royale Theatre.

Gielgud’s distinguished rendition of Wilde’s most famous play was so well received that, after only a short run, it was made the recipient of a ‘Special Tony Award’—the specialty being that the award was given to the entire cast of the play.²

Students of Wilde showbiz should be mindful of this rare distinction because the achievement could essentially happen again this year.

The quaint reason for this is that the entire cast of Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ consists of only one person.³ Sarah Snook plays all twenty-six characters in the story, and if she wins an award, they all do.

This unique phenomenon is made possible in the 2025 production because many of the roles are not only played on stage, some are also relayed live on camera, while others are recorded and displayed on screens—and the whole is ably supported by active crew members and camera operators on the set.

Despite these elements of collaborative innovation, it is a bravura performance, and one wonders whether there has ever been a more breathtaking Broadway debut.

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The Simulcast of Dorian Gray

The playing of twenty-six characters in twenty-six costumes via screens and vignettes on, off, and even under the stage, nonstop for two hours while smoking, walking, talking, singing, dancing, and altering make-up, is a lot of acting.⁴

Consequently, the word acting is hardly sufficient to describe Sarah Snook’s presence—which has more the physicality of performance art—although act she can as attested by a powerfully moving final monologue.

Thus any appreciation of the play must rely heavily on the personality of Snook herself. But her star quality is well exploited. Along the way she remains constantly amusing and playful, with knowing nods and winks through the fourth wall, possibly drawing on a pre-existing rapport with devotees of her HBO persona.

All of this places the staging, and Snook’s performance in particular, beyond one’s normal appreciation—in fact, any comparison with actors in other productions seems almost unfair. Besides, finer drama critics than I have already bestowed their almost unanimous praise. The only detractors appear to be variations on a theme of old thespian: either stagecraft curmudgeons or the technology-challenged. This latter category was neatly epitomized by an otherwise erudite scribe who confessed to being unable to appreciate the production’s “grotesque effects” because he was “only a theater critic.”⁵

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Novel Experience

So it falls to me to provide a review less theatrical and more textual; and more Oscar-centric. From this perspective I am pleased to report that the art and literature of the original novel are not only well represented in Kip Williams’s play, but they have been brought to the stage with fidelity and imagination.

The first noticeable way in which this adherence is experienced is in the spoken narration and dialogue, which, from the outset, closely follows the written text. This is possible because, rare among Victorian writers, Wilde’s voice remains accessible to modern audiences. Probably too, the director was wise enough to accept there had been enough adapting in the theatrical treatment without presuming to ‘improve’ the written word. One is reminded of Wilde’s rejoinder to a suggestion to change a line in one of his own plays when he said: “who am I to tamper with a masterpiece?”

Similarly, the plot remains closer to the original source than many a literary adaptation, and again this evinces a directorial respect for the book’s author. The characters and incidents of the story are well maintained, although a full appraisal is difficult with only a single viewing of the helter-skelter staging, and in this respect I found the hunting scene a little confusing, and perhaps overlong.

Interestingly, the play’s most considered identification with the plot structure is its recognition of the novel’s notorious Chapter XI—in which Wilde essentially suspends the story to provide an expiation of Dorian’s newfound hedonism. The scenic design recreates this as a musical sequence in a framed box room center-stage—where Dorian indulges in perfumes, jewels, embroideries, and other decadent milieu.

The director’s decision to focus on this important, but purely descriptive, passage in Wilde’s narrative was an unexpected pleasure, and is to be commended as a gracious and studious inclusion.

Finally, there are knowing allusions to the spirit of Wilde himself. Some of these observations are, perhaps, esoteric, and include passing references to the yellow novel, digs at Shakespeare, and a wall hanging of the Bronzino portrait cleverly photoshopped with the face Sarah Snook as Dorian Gray.⁶

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“How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June…. If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!”

The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch. 1

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Face Time

So we come to the principal conceit of Dorian Gray—namely the satire of vanity.

Oscar Wilde believed that art should not be moralistic, but even he had to accept that by ending the novel fatalistically, Dorian Gray is a moral tale: that the pursuit of youth and beauty is a failing of character. Not that Oscar quite believed that, but in the 1880s one stopped short of glorifying sin.

Such Victorian social ethics are probably even more relevant today, and the play brings Wilde’s warning up-to-date with a smart parallel between the painted portrait and the symbolic selfie. The added parody of lip augmentation reasserts where the play’s sensibilities lie. Technology is also cleverly exploited by the use a face-distorting filter to oscillate between Dorian’s facial beauty and his soul’s ugliness.

This is, of course, why the play is rendered the way it is—with screens and cameras. By delivering the message by means of the very medium being confronted, an inherent irony is inescapable—and yet it purposefully permits Kip Williams to explore issues of self deception. Meanwhile, Sarah Snook ensures that we are not exempt from reflection. The large screen projection of her gazing into the glass holds a mirror up to the audience.

On the whole, it is easy to be swept up in the euphoria and exhaustion of a two-hour virtuoso production and performance.

One wonders whether the awe and delight may be a function of the smoke and mirrors. However, having had time to realize how the magic trick was performed, there is still the sense of being mightily impressed.

Surface it may be, but the play’s superficiality may be a very modern way to read the book, and it is hoped that more people will be induced to indulge in the real thing. After all, it is in Dorian Gray that we find Wilde’s aphorism that “it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances”.

© John Cooper, 2025.

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Footnotes:

1. The awards were named for Antoinette “Tony” Perry, an actress, producer, and theatre director who co-founded the American Theatre Wing. ↩︎
2. Special award for Outstanding Foreign Company (1947): The cast of The Importance of Being Earnest. (Donald Bain, Jane Baxter, Pamela Brown, Jean Cadell, Stringer Davis, Robert Flemyng, John Gielgud, John Kidd, Margaret Rutherford, and Richard Wordsworth). Presented at the second award ceremony in 1948.
   https://www.tonyawards.com/winners/year/1948/category/any/show/any/ ↩︎
3. The only one-person play to win the Best Play Tony Award was ‘I Am My Own Wife’ by Douglas Wright (2004). Its star, Jefferson Mays, also won a Tony that year, as Best Actor in a Play. ↩︎
4. It would help to appreciate how far we have come since the 1947 production of Earnest if Margaret Rutherford could understudy for Sarah Snook. ↩︎
5. Robert Hofler, The Wrap. ↩︎
6. For more on Oscar Wilde’s art collection see:
   https://marlandonwilde.blogspot.com/2021/11/works-of-art-in-oscar-wildes-house.html ↩︎

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