This Picture of Dorian Gray Leaps Off the Wall

Kip Williams’s production of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray employs a unique ‘cine-theatre’ technique, enhancing the story’s exploration of influence and beauty in modern culture. The adaptation, featuring Sarah Snook, successfully captures Wilde's disdain for moral judgment, rendering themes of influencer culture and the obsession with youth through a contemporary lens. The production reflects the powerful resonance of Wilde’s words on the exercise of influence, illustrating the destructive allure of aesthetic perfection amidst societal vapidity—a stark reminder of today's pervasive, obsession with presenting an idealized self online.

There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence...to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume.

Kip Williams’s production bursts from the stage as if fired from a confetti cannon, its sinister contemporary resonances glittering as they float down upon our heads.

The solipsistic decadence of influencer culture, the corrosive obsession with youth and beauty...it’s all just a click away on any smartphone.

Williams’s adaptation...approached with the expert calibrations of Sarah Snook, stays true to Wilde's disdain for moral snobbery.

Read at Vulture