how are you going to do the picture?’
Well, every production must find its own solution, and much as I would hope that any future production of this script will pay little regard to my stage directions and concentrate on finding its own response to the imagery of the original story, this adaptation does come with a built-in proposition as to how the picture of the title is to be realised. (Please note; if you are an audience member reading this introduction before you see the show tonight, then it might be wise to stop reading now). One of the strongest tricks of Wilde’s story is its suggestiveness – indeed, in some crucial ways the story might even be said to be about the power of suggestion. As Lord Henry Wotton puts it in the speech that triggers Dorian’s fatal wish that he may never age, ‘It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place….’ And Lord Henry is right; almost all of the novel’s horrors are left – cleverly and insidiously – to the reader’s deliberately inflamed imagination. Every crime that Dorian is accused of – the drugs, the suicides, the homosexuality, the bisexuality, the orgies, the adultery, the blackmail – remain, largely, just that, accusations. Little is laid down in black and white, much is hinted at – in confessions, in salacious hints, in gossip and in rumour. With the exception of Basil Hallward’s murder, we never actually see him at work on anyone’s flesh. Likewise, the picture of the title is mostly left in the mind’s eye. Basil’s style of painting for instance is left completely unspecified – is he as radical an artist as Wilde’s contemporary Whistler was, or as skilfully formulaic as Carolus Duran – or as somewhere-in-between as John Singer Sargeant, in whose work flattery and authenticity are often indistinguishable? We are never told. Although the very first changes to his masterpiece’s painted surface are subtly and economically evoked, it is never thereafter described in anything approaching detail – even the family portraits that hang in Dorian’s country house are more accurately described. This trick of suggestiveness works a very particular kind of spell, and one that is essential to the story’s success. By making his readers imagine the corruption of the picture, Wilde makes us subtly and uncannily complicit in that corruption, and therefore in Dorian’s also. The logic is that of all seducers: if we can imagine his sins, then surely we can also imagine committing them ourselves – and if we can imagine that, then surely on some (perhaps unconscious?) level that must mean that we want to commit them? That is why, in this staging, the picture is done suggestively; with nothing but Wilde’s original words. Like a conjuror insisting that he has nothing up his sleeve, my script starts the evening by showing the audience a provocatively blank (if diabolically black) canvas. Then, every time that Dorian looks at it, the actors paint that canvas with strokes and fragments of Wilde’s prose. Simple as that.
This device also has the great virtue of economy. It means that the budget can be spent on actors, not in the props department. It also honours the fact that it is to hear Wilde’s language that people have bought their tickets, not to see a bit of scene painting or (these days) a video installation. It is his way with words that an audience wants to experience – that extraordinary, idiosyncratic phrasing, with its apparently undiminished ability (in both its high comic and the lower, melodramatic, gothic modes) to outrage propriety and embody transgression.
‘It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors’
The Chorus
All through his life, Wilde was obsessed with the idea of tragedy. In De Profundis, he tried to re-shape his messy, catastrophic affair with Douglas into a downfall of tragic proportions and trajectory, explicitly comparing himself at one point to a figure out of Sophocles. In Salome, he tried to seriously re-invent poetic tragedy as a valid contemporary theatrical form, and very nearly succeeded. Not content to be creatures of melodrama merely, the secret-riddled heroes and heroines of all of his plays (even of The Importance; who is Lady Bracknell, if not Nemesis herself?) often speak of themselves as being dogged by almost classical Furies of guilt and terror. This obsession was where I found my alibi for the idea that the passages of prose describing the picture should be spoken not by characters, but by the company stepping out of character and acting as a chorus. And once the company had become a chorus, I knew I then had a way of realising the extraordinarily suggestive (that word again) manner in which the novel both celebrates and damns its hero. Because it is always both within and without the action, a chorus’s function must always necessarily be ambiguous. In this case, the more they claim to be taking a merely documentary, story-telling approach to the proceedings – the more they insist that they are only there to act as witnesses and supply the odd fact or suggestion – the more they betray the fact that they seem to be somehow relishing their allotted task of personally chivvying, luring and tricking
Dorian to his pre-ordained death. To put it bluntly, they seem to feel about Dorian the same way as we do. They seem to know – somehow – that we want the pleasure of seeing this beautiful young man dare to commit all of these sins on our behalf, but also at the same time want the pleasure of seeing him appallingly punished (on our behalf) for committing them. Or should that be the other way round?
When they speak in their function as chorus, this script suggests that on occasion the ensemble drop the accents – the masks, if you like – of their characters. When the piece is produced elsewhere, this will have its own fresh implications, but in the auditorium of the Abbey, Ireland’s national theatre, the room for which this adaptation was created, this switch of accent had a very specific and entirely intentional effect. It meant hearing Wilde as an Irish voice. I knew from having already staged An Ideal Husband with a company of Irish actors at the Abbey that Irish voices of all kinds and classes often bring a peculiarly apt energy to Wilde’s writing, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that they have to deliver it in what is, to them, a foreign accent. As any voice coach will tell you, there are two elements to successfully assuming an accent which is not naturally your own; you have to get both the accent itself right, and (perhaps more importantly) you have to grasp this foreign voice’s essential music. Although the accent of Wilde’s writing is always that of his adopted London, the music (to my ear at least, and at least below the surface) is often deeply Irish. The trademark paradoxes aside, in his prose and in the longer speeches of his stage dialogue especially, there is often something in the sheer loquacity, in the sense of language as performance and especially in the highly distinctive drive through the full-stops to that all-important end of an extended paragraph that is a whole Irish Sea away from the clipped, tightly-corseted linguistic protocols of Belgravia and Chelsea. When it came to the “voicing” of the picture in this script, I simply wanted to unleash some of that music. I am well aware that this apparently simple shift of voice is in fact far from simple, and that it sets up all sorts of other echoes, and begs all sort of other questions. But in this story which is so much about surface and what lies beneath it, so much about what can and can’t be left behind when one re-invents oneself, it seemed entirely legitimate to make the public voices of Dorian’s world as scrupulously and artificially English as possible, while letting his most private life resonate with some of the sounds which his creator so ruthlessly ironed out of his own public voice when he emigrated and re-invented himself as the voice of not just society, but Society.
‘To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim’
Dorian as Autobiography
Because he has been for over a century an artist whose life is as famous – if not more famous – than his work, Dorian is a story which audiences are keen to read autobiographically. This is not a modern phenomenon. As early as 1890, when the book first appeared as a magazine serialisation, the reviews unanimously accused it of betraying its author’s own immoral lifestyle. In 1895, the prosecuting council at Wilde’s Old Bailey trial quoted the book at length during his cross-examination in an attempt to prove that Wilde was guilty of his leading character’s crimes, chiefly that of practising homosexuality. Wilde himself encouraged this biographical reading. He famously said that Lord Henry was
