The Picture of Dorian Gray - Haymarket 2024

The prices are insane for this!

Absolutely bonkers pricing.

Indeed. I got a great seat for 47 at the box office an hour before showtime, 150 online in advance.

Yes. Please please PLEASE don’t choose to pay less for your ticket. Because then the greedy group will get less money than if it is unsold at a higher price. And please don’t forget that this is a competitive business and rising prices and other factors are driving up prices to the consumer and many are willing to pay the prices.

I'm well aware of the issues related to rising prices in the theater. Normally, I would just go with the flow, but I think this group is going above and beyond. 

I just looked and the £149 Dress Circle seat I booked is now £249.

Unfortunately, the prices are indeed crazy, but reassuringly, the Gods seats are MUCH better than you would expect from a typical show.

This exceeded my expectations by a country mile!

Given the integration of live recording by cameras, with prerecorded material, it hit me like the best episode of Jackanory I've ever seen, an episode that could have been directed by Katie Mitchell at her best.

It works on multiple levels, and is as much performance art and art installation as it is a theatrical narrative.

Some spoilers follow. . .

I formed a view of what this might be like before I booked, and I thought it'll be good but not great, certainly not worth the price of the Stalls or the Dress, so I went for Row E of the Upper Circle at £39.25 (evil dynamic pricing might have raised these tickets to £79.25 by now).

Anyway, I was proven wrong on two counts:

(1) This is truly GREAT storytelling, where not only do the acting and technology fuse to tell Oscar Wilde's gothic monstrous period story in the wittiest and most exciting way possible, but also, for me, it was clear that the storytelling works equally well from the inside out, where a parallel story, about our modern fusion with technology, is also being told, and Oscar Wilde's story has been chosen precisely because it is the perfect tool with which to tell that parallel story about where we are now.

With an absolutely bravura performance by Sarah Snook at the centre of both stories, I felt that overall, this was an utterly dazzling piece;

(2) My assumption that I had bought a crap seat was also proven wrong.

For me, the measure of a crap seat is that you can't see the expressions of the actors. When we see an expression on someone else's face, our own faces mirror those expressions subconsciously, and we feel the feelings they feel. Therefore, if you can't see a (good) actor's expressions, you miss out on a great deal of the emotional rollercoaster ride of a show.

Not so here, where the cameras are like "Sunset Boulevard" on steroids. Where Jamie Lloyd doled out his projections judiciously, this show ladles them on like the multiple big screens at Glastonbury, and then some!

That is the point of the meta-narrative, I would argue, in that we are watching one woman create a metaverse movie reality in which she can be anyone and anything. Since the movie, and creating it, are the point of the show, it's not a bug that most of the time you are watching the movie, rather than Snook herself, but a feature.

Snook appears as all the characters at once, all prerecorded but one, in which she flits between the characters. She is like David Bowie at play, creating versions of herself, in such a way, that like in Bowie's Lazarus, the work could survive without her if she was to disappear completely.

The iPhone motif, with it's image apps, which one poster above didn't like, is , for me, a paramount illustration of how powerful the technology we have at our fingertips is, how close we all are to being Dorian Gray, narcissistically curating versions of ourselves on screens that don't match reality: how playfully fun it can be, as well as how dangerously destabilising it can be.

From the Gods, we can see the whites of Snook's eyes, in multiple characters. We feel the whole game of the evanescent reality that she is creating, it's gleeful camp dress-up playfulness, but also we feel the mystery of where she herself lies hidden amongst all her selves: which one is she now, what is real, what is fake, how much is play, how much out-of-control narcissism?

We see the history of art leading to where we are now, with Picasso style cubist shots of Snook's face, as Dorian Gray, simultaneously, from all angles, the fragmentation of one identity, even as she appears as other identities simultaneously.

And, my goodness, the narcissism with the iPhone is such a moment of now, as well as a brilliant illustration of Wilde, that I was overcome by how wonderful this show is, and how fine the view from the Gods, where the audience get to vicariously live in the deepfake future, along with Snook, for a couple of hours, in the dark, out of sight, out of harm's way.

Anyway, at it's core, this is the best, and most witty, and most gripping Jackanory version of Oscar Wilde imaginable. Soon, we will all be Dorian Gray.

5 stars from me.

Sarah Snook gives a good performance - but honestly I was bored.

The video comes across a little gimmicky ( and losing a bit of sheen in the wake of Sunset Blvd )

Perhaps it’s the plot line / underlying story to blame but certainly wouldn’t recommend anyone rush out and see it.

The Haymarket is not a huge theatre.

Very pro-Aussie perspective here, but I’d love to know how Sarah Snoek’s performance differs from the actress who originated the role at the STC(Eryn Jean Norville). And if anyone was going to extend or take over, I’d love it to be her, rather than Cate.

Also, I’m not sure I have yet forgiven Cate for ‘When We Have Sufficiently Tortured The Audience.’

She is famously recycling her fashion (but you are right.)