he saw himself. As ever, he was being creative with the truth. Lord Henry is perhaps a deeper portrait than his creator knew or intended. He may be fashionably paradoxical and superficial in both his conversation and daily life, but behind this verbal smokescreen he has a genuinely savage intellectual contempt for the bourgeois niceties and evasions of his society and (as he nears the end of his story) an almost tragic self-awareness that go way beyond the popular caricature of Wilde as an effete dandy and give us – with hindsight – perhaps the truest self-image of the great man himself outside of De Profundis. Basil, meanwhile, may share Wilde’s own vulnerability to unrequited love for good-looking young men who cannot possibly either understand or reciprocate his devotion, but there the similarities tellingly end – or rather, stray into wish-fulfillment. Wilde never dared, as Basil does, to cut himself free from his infatuation, pack his bags and set out for Paris in order to dedicate himself entirely to his work (the very steps, not at all coincidentally, that several of Wilde’s friends were to beg him to take in the twenty-four hours before his eventual arrest in 1895). Perhaps this act of moral and emotional courage was why Wilde saw fit to deprive Basil of his planned new life just twenty minutes before he starts it, and to finish him off with such a violent, horrible and curiously sexual death; he had to be punished for an erotic and emotional honesty of which his creator (and his century) were convinced they could only dream.
The oddest correspondence between Wilde’s life and fiction comes in the character of Dorian himself. Like Lord Alfred Douglas, Dorian is blond-haired, blue-eyed and redlipped; indeed, the very same hackneyed phrases used to describe the young Dorian in the novel reappear almost word for word in Wilde’s letters describing Douglas to his friends. Like Dorian, Douglas was upper-class Oxonian charm incarnate. Like Dorian, once he was launched into London Society he turned out to have an insatiable appetite for both working-class sex and upper-class luxury, to be a consummate liar, and to have a truly psychopathic disregard for the consequences of his actions on those close to him. The match is perfect. The Picture of Dorian Gray, however, was published in 1890, and Wilde didn’t meet his nemesis until the summer of 1891. Dorian is not a reflection of Wilde’s life, but an uncanny anticipation of it. He may be a complete fiction, but for the man who created him he turned out to be horribly and inescapably real. One of the reasons the story is so powerful, perhaps, is that we now know it to be the work of a man exactly imagining his own private hell of erotic and moral destruction, but unaware that he is doing just that.
‘The artist is the creator of beautiful things’
This Adaptation
The word ‘adaptation’ can hide a multitude of sins in the theatre, but this one is as true to its source as over thirty years of my reading, studying, staging and having imaginary conversations with Oscar Wilde can make it. While using the extended narrative structure of the 1891 book-length version of the story, I have in several key places used the phrasing of Wilde’s original 1890 typescript of the story, which has only recently been published (in 2011, in a brilliant edition by Nicholas Frankel for the Harvard University Press). Several key sentences and passages in this typescript were significantly toned down before publication, first by Wilde’s editors, and later by Wilde himself, and the original is a salutary reminder of how authentically shocking the story’s first appearance must have been, with its almost-candid references to both homosexual and heterosexual passions. Aficionados of the Collected Works will easily spot the places where – inspired by and hopefully justified by Wilde’s own relentless re-cycling of his own best lines from work to work – I have used sentences from other plays and prose works to convey in succinct dialogue what in the book is conveyed in more extended prose. But rest assured, it is all Wilde. For instance, the fragment of the letter which Dorian writes to Sybil, which some eagle-eared audience members will correctly remember is not actually quoted in the novel, is in fact a fragment of one of Wilde’s own. The curt first line of the show, which may be a surprise to those familiar with the novel’s gloriously orchestrated opening description of a lazy London summer’s afternoon, is in fact the last line of the self-justifying introductory preface which Wilde added to the 1891 book version of his story after it had been so savagely reviewed. My biggest intervention is one I’ll freely admit to, the replacement of the lacklustre Hetty Morton with the Duchess of Monmouth as Dorian’s final real affair (Hetty, I’m afraid, is the character in the book-length version of the story where the author’s rush to bash out his word-count and get to the end is most plainly visible). Her words are quarried more or less literally out of several passages from the novel’s last three chapters, but I was inspired to make her American not only by the vivid real-life examples of all the American heiresses who did indeed marry into the British peerage either side of Wilde’s fin de siècle, but also (and more immediately) by the half-contemptuous, half-admiring chatter about those ladies that surfaces in several of Wilde’s stories, and which memorably decorates the dialogue of the first act of A Woman of No Importance. I also (it must be admitted) wanted to give the actress playing Sybil Vane, who as the first of Dorian’s victims necessarily dies rather early on in the evening, a good crack at the second act, and this time to escape alive.
The interpretation of the time scheme of the novel is my own. Wilde tells us that Dorian is twenty when the story begins, and a day short of thirty-eight when he kills Basil Hallward. How much time then elapses before Dorian’s own death then concludes the story is never specified. Since the start of the story is set in his own contemporary 1890s London, and since the action of that story must logically take at the very least nearly twenty years, Wilde implies that his anti-hero lives on well into the twentieth century – a century which Wilde himself barely survived into, and which for his original readers lay far in the unknowable future. I have simply stretched that conceit, thus making Dorian’s ennui as the years mount a much more serious matter. In this time scheme, Lady Monmouth will almost certainly (I hope) end up in Paris partying with Nancy Cunard. Dorian will attend the first night of Coward’s The Vortex – and probably wonder what all the fuss is about – and as Lord Henry dies will then face the prospect of the long, low, dishonest decade of the 1930s with limitless money and absolutely no friends. By freeing him from the constraining and perhaps over-familiar frame of a purely Victorian costume drama, I hope this imagery helps him to live as not only Wilde’s contemporary but also, implicitly, as ours.
A few final practical thoughts for anyone considering taking on this script themselves. This piece was written for an ensemble of seventeen actors, but I imagine could be done with one or two less. With the exception of Dorian himself, all of the actors double both as other parts and as members of the Chorus – when speaking in their function of the chorus, outside of the story, their lines are marked in the script in bold; when they are speaking both outside of the story and outside of their characters – in other words, in their own voices and accents – their lines are marked in italics. The pace of the script assumes that the story is being told in a single, striking stage environment, one in which location is conjured through the use of sound and light rather than on a series of descriptive sets requiring time-consuming scene changes. If at all possible, there should be no walls or doors, so that a character can go from room to room or from Belgravia to Limehouse by taking a single step.
The staging of Dorian’s death and the final restoration of the picture can be as much of a coup de theatre or as little of one as the circumstances and logic of the production demand. In the book, it is done with great economy – nothing is shown. In the theatre, however…
The costumes, I rather think, should be sensational.
Neil Bartlett
London and Dublin, 2012
This adaptation was originally commissioned by the Abbey Theatre for the 2012 Dublin Theatre Festival and it was first performed on 27 September 2012 in a production created by the following Company:
