There can be few superlatives left to describe Sarah Snook’s performance in Kip Williams’s London staging of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray – for the simple reason that she’s that good. Three days after I saw the play, at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, Snook was awarded the Olivier Award for best actress. According to the Guardian’s Lanre Bakare’s summation of the awards on 14 April, she was, from an impressive list, the sole ‘marquee name’ to do so. In her West End début, Snook gives a rockstar-like performance, one that exceeds expectations in a production where the stage is dominated by flamboyance and showmanship.

When Snook and multiple camera operators stride onto the bare black stage, it leaps into extravagant life. Screens large and small fill the space, revealing Snook as Wilde’s artist (Basil Hallward), viewer (Sir Henry), and subject (Dorian Gray). This dynamic opening culminates in a giant screen: a smart phone come to grotesque life, dominating both stage and auditorium. It frames an insistent close-up of Snook as the fretful painter. The image is uncomfortably close. Colour bursts from the frame, wrenching the characters up and away from the physical stage, where they gather power from a darkly humorous verisimilitude, full of implicit danger. Together, Snook and a chorus of cameras extend the actor’s performance to create the entire novel/cast – twenty-six characters in all, ranging from sombre to comic, flamboyant to dour, hefty to throw-away, with a roguish knowingness that’s part Shakespeare, part Monty Python.

Snook flings these characters at the audience with audacious assurance. Her tongue-in-cheek delivery sees her do a turn as Juliet (with a hilarious nod to Beckett), ravage a puppet show, swoon through some Liszt, and belt out a tune à la Judy Garland. The delight she takes in this theatrical alchemy is inimitable. Galvanised, the audience laughs, applauds, winces with recognition, and gasps as actor and director rip away the mask of performance, revealing the myriad masks of humankind, in a virtuosic performance whose heady switches of age, accent, place, and circumstance are performed with staggering clarity.

As Dorian is caught up in the murky web of Sir Henry’s machinations, so too the audience is swept up by events that seem fateful even while they are constantly refracted by the ever-changing stage/screen space. Back-stage becomes front-stage; the audience, cast as voyeurs, sees the world behind the world. This is how the stage works, these are the mechanics. The actor is prepared, costumed, and directed, the alchemy stripped bare; a double witnessing of actor and character captured on film and thrust onto the stage via virtual portraits suspended in space and time. A deconstructed performance born of a highly constructed text becomes a 3D enactment of the way we deconstruct our own lives, portrait by portrait, selfie by selfie, framing and reframing a million different guises.

Sarah Snook and camera operators in The Picture of Dorian Gray (photograph by Marc Brenner)

The use of film compels the audience to view the actor’s face in arresting close-up. There is a sense that we are privy to something beneath the skin, to thoughts and privations we ought not to witness. Here, in an age of motionless faces, radical facial freedom radiates from one who does not age. It’s the face of AI, Botox on speed, a satire that morphs into a searing critique of modern life. The assertion that ‘All influence is immoral’ becomes a warning for our own times and is repeatedly played out as a desire to dominate; a war between folly and common sense, authenticity and fakery, beauty and ugliness, a tawdry void where the soul is obsolete and youth is the only thing worth having. The Faustian pact at the heart of Wilde’s conflict (a soul in exchange for eternal youth) heralds a frenzied hedonism, which claims to be experience itself, whose consequence is an alarming lack of consequence – a disturbing and all too relevant subject for our age of entitlement.

As Dorian destroys those around him, he is protected from the consequences of his actions by the ageing painting in his attic. A painting whose beauty has been transposed to and remains forever with the subject represents a transgression for which artist and subject will pay with their lives. The stage, a series of ‘pictures’ of the vast cast Snook inhabits, not only echoes the changing portrait of Dorian (which the audience never sees) but also maintains the drama of the initial transgression. Ultimately, this violation culminates hilariously in a scene featuring a filter app which distorts her moving image. A melodrama that satirises the modern facility to create and distort image at will ends with Snook in direct address, from both stage and screen, simultaneously breaking out of and into the action, with a provocative, ‘Hey! I’m doing this live!’; reminding the audience that, despite the predominance of technology, what we’re watching is real. Sculpting facial features to nightmarish proportions on phone screens may be comical, but it’s also a sobering reference to Dorian’s corrupted portrait and the realisation that the latter is a hidden transgression, while the former is brazenly on display.

From this point on, the pace of the production shifts gears as stage and screen vie for our attention. All is spirited spectacle. Props, like lightening quick baton changes, pass from actor to sinewy black-clad technicians. Costume changes, fast and furious, are in full view. Wigs, jackets, collars, and corsets are donned and paraded with cat-walk élan, supporting a gender sleight of hand (a seamless feature of this production) that is a shrewd comment on our times and a reminder that such ideas are not so twenty-first century after all.

Clemence Williams’s sound design supports and propels this shifting ground and the elegant choreography of the camera operators, who glide around the stage with a fluidity that belies their heavy equipment and the need to hit what must be hundreds of floor makers, the aligning of camera with actor being crucial. The result is a joyful shifting of realities, enlivened by Marg Horwell’s lavish costume design, with the provocative clash of innocent whites with dark, indulgent colours. Howell’s increasingly wild wigs and playful make-up, complementing Snook’s performance, cast the privilege and entitlement of both the era and today into bold relief.

The scale of this production – created in Australia back in 2020 and thriving in its current season on the West End – mirrors that of Williams’s vision. His adaptation is as alive as any of Wilde’s plays and leaves space in the text for Snook to make the part her own. With a nod to the assured theatrics of Stephan Elliott’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom, Kip Williams, along with original performer Eryn Jean Norvill (recipient of the 2023 Australian Greenroom award for best actress) and Sarah Snook have created a startingly new version of a nineteenth-century text that is not just modern but shockingly so. Dorian Gray is playing to packed houses, standing ovations, a month’s extension, two Olivier Awards and, the night I saw it, Kylie Minogue, who dashed into the auditorium. Oscar Wilde would surely have relished it all.

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The Picture of Dorian Gray (Sydney Theatre Company) continues at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London until 11 May 2024. Performance attended: 10 April.