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We spend nearly fifteen minutes watching intently a vertical screen on a seemingly empty stage. On screen, Australian actress Sarah Snook is up close reading the fast, playful prose of Oscar Wilde’s 1890 masterpiece The Picture of Dorian Gray, adapted with ingenuity and pace by Australian director Kip Williams. Snook looks earnestly into the camera as she narrates the story of Victorian portrait painter Basil, who shares his latest subject, an exquisitely innocent young man named Dorian Gray, with his snake-like friend Lord Henry. Over the course of the performance, Snook changes wigs and jumps through time, embodying twenty-six characters from Wilde’s proto-horror novel, in which the young man’s portrait ages, revealing the marks of his sins, while his own beautiful face remains forever young. As art leaves a mark on the soul, can the soul leave a mark on art? Perhaps four seasons playing the morally degenerate Shiv Roy on Succession have made Snook think about such questions more acutely than ever.
Inhabiting all the roles, Snook creates performances within performances, musings within musings, creating a Wildean sense of saturated mille-feuille. The stage managers and cameramen move around her; we see their black-clad figures shifting at the edges. On screen, the costume designers fit Snook with a gold cotton-candy wig and a flowing white shirt for the role of Dorian. After the first fifteen minutes, when she emerges from the edge of the screen and becomes visible to the audience, the actress’s relative diminutiveness is shocking: the billboard-sized image—upright, like a cellphone—made her seem enormous, sharp, and close.
Williams first brought this multimedia Dorian Gray to Australia in 2020 with another actress, Erin Jean Norville, but when the show traveled to London, Snook took over the role. Her performance at the Haymarket Theatre in the West End was a huge success, winning an Olivier Award, and she is now bringing Gray to Broadway. The show is a true athletic feat: Snook performs complex, demanding dance moves, timed to the second to interact with her recorded selves, and speaks for two hours straight – with only three moments when she can sneak a sip of water.
Throughout Dorian Gray, there is a constant tension between what we can perceive and what we know to be real. The stage feels haunted, and in some ways so has Snook’s career, which has taken her from drama school in Sydney to film (where she starred in Steve Jobs and The Glass Castle) to the London stage (where she played the temptress Hilda Vangel opposite Ralph Fiennes in Ibsen’s The Master Builder at the Old Vic) and then to her most famous role, her Emmy-winning turn as Shiv in The Descendants. I met Snook at the Algonquin Hotel, sitting in an empty, slightly derelict events space called the Oak Room, once the site of a bored supper club where the singer Sylvia Syms collapsed and died at the feet of Cy Coleman. Snook spoke to me about her other stage work and the various forces that led her to Wilde. (This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)
Your projects have a Zeitgeist feel to them. Of course, it might seem like presidential candidate Mencken from The Descendants is our current president! This work comes at a time when we are particularly concerned about image. The Substance feels very much like a response to Dorian Gray's body horror, for example.
When [Kip and I] first spoke on Zoom, he talked about the Victorian era as a time when the word “individual” became popular. Kip sees this heightened narcissism, this heightened sense of individuality, the image-based dandies, as underpinning what’s happening now. Kip read an interview with Oscar, who mentioned that the three main characters in the book – Dorian, Basil, and Lord Henry – are all aspects of himself, that Lord Henry is who society thinks he is; Dorian is who he wants to be; and Basil is who he probably really is. We do this naturally with ourselves now: we have a version of ourselves on Instagram; a version of ourselves with our family; a version of ourselves with our friends in public; a version of ourselves at work. It’s easier to separate those [versions] now than ever before.
You spend so much time at the beginning of the show invisible, when you're behind the screen, hidden “behind the curtain” in a sort of Wizard of Oz. Do you feel the energy from the audience when they see you on screen, but you yourself are still hidden?
At my first show [in London] I went out,
Sourse: newyorker.com
