Memories of Sarah Snook’s commanding Shiv Roy in Succession vanish in the face of the Australian actress’s impish, boggling, one-woman rendition of Oscar Wilde’s story.
Live and recorded footage and grotesque Instagram-filtered selfie visions, shown on a series of dangling screens, mesh with her physical presence as she romps round a playroom stage in a series of outrageous costumes, wigs and stick-on sideburns. It’s a virtuoso performance bereft of vanity. Once you get past the basic premise, that is.
The effects of age and depravity are famously borne by Dorian’s portrait rather than his face and body. Adapter-director Kip Williams’s production for Sydney Theatre Company stresses the gap between appearance and reality that’s become even wider in our screen-centred age. Snook shows us sweat, snot and desperation in unforgiving close-up, and relishes the absurdity of her characterisations.
As Dorian she resembles a preeningly self-satisfied version of Bubbles from the Pears soap ad; as his actress lover Sybil Vane she’s a smirking, talentless head popping up in a puppet theatre.
Her male and female aristocrats are fed cigarettes and Botox injections by offscreen hands. Outfits that start as stylised, brightly-coloured takes on Victorian fashions spiral into a gaudy sartorial mishmash of Elvis, Liberace and a drag king lineup at the Vauxhall Tavern.
As with recent solo versions of Great Expectations and Uncle Vanya by Eddie Izzard and Andrew Scott, you’ve got to ask yourself if this approach throws new light on the original material, or just provides a spotlight for the performer to show off.
As a woman playing both men and women Snook emphasises the artificiality of Wilde’s world and – by the by – shows that the veil he drew over the story’s homoeroticism was as thin as a cigarette paper. At times, in person as Dorian, she argues with her own chic, auburn-haired onscreen image as the narrator, over who has command of the plot.
This is a technically adroit and complex production in which a team of stage managers play almost as important a part as Snook. Often it’s hard to see where the live footage ends and the pre-recorded imagery begins, or quite who is filming her at any given time. As in Jamie Lloyd’s recent Sunset Boulevard, you feel the onstage crew really deserve their own award.
Is it a hubristic project, a project about hubris, or both? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Pre-Succession, Snook showed herself an actress of singular flair and magnetism in The Master Builder, opposite Ralph Fiennes, at the Almeida in 2016. Her extreme, carnivalesque performance here is like nothing else I’ve ever seen.
Whether you enjoy this show as a star vehicle, a Wildean debate on morality versus self-expression, or a cutting-edge piece of mixed-media art, it’s an extraordinary event.
Theatre Royal Haymarket, to May 11; doriangrayplay.com
