Bewley’s, Dublin
“All art is quite useless,” wrote Oscar Wilde, approvingly, in the preface to his only novel. The phenomenon of dinner theatre might support the claim, where art is something to be consumed along with a main course and desert; diverting, nourishing and easily digested.
Wonderland Productions, who previously served up Goldoni's comedy La Locandieraalongside a three-course meal, don't find the context quite so appropriate or fluent for Wilde. Where Goldoni's innkeeper Mirandolina could plausibly hand out starters while addressing the audience directly, here Dorian won't sit for his supernatural portrait until coffee has been served.
Adapter and director Alice Coughlan is otherwise faithful to Wilde’s Gothic melodrama. The spine of the narrative is retained, its slimmed-down prose divided neatly between three protagonists – the initially beatific Dorian (Michael Winder), his besotted portraitist Basil Hallward (Michael James Ford), and his serpentine corruptor Lord Henry (Simon Coury) – all of whom share the narrator’s voice. One happy consequence is that Wilde’s familiar epigrams are treated fondly but without reverence.
The freshest aspect of Coughlan’s reading is in its clear-sighted simplicity. There is no set to speak of, apart from an empty gilt-edged picture frame, and designer Tara Jones- Hamilton wisely decides that a story bound between social clubs, drawing rooms and a dusty attic will feel right at home on the third floor of Bewley’s.
The space slightly hampers our access to the performances, though, where Michael James Ford’s saturnine longing makes a more satisfyingly intriguing character than the head-tossing figure of the novel, while Simon Coury is the embodiment of subversive languor.
The near-erotic fascination the men have for the boy’s youth is laid on thick, with heavy echoes of Wilde’s own sexual double life: it is “a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter”, as Basil might say. That may explain the marginal role of women, but it leads the production into one distracting tonal mis-step when Ford makes a parodic appearance as Lady Henry. Elsewhere, the abandoned actress, Sybil Vain, is more pointedly and poignantly represented by an empty chair and the gesture is both intelligent and sinister: crystallising the novel’s dualities between reality and appearance, truth and construct, life and art.
If Winder’s Dorian leaves a fainter impression, it’s because Wilde’s beautiful, impressionable anti-hero is, at root, a compelling cipher. That empty picture frame says it all. As we project our imagined portrait of degradation and disfigurement between its edges, Wonderland rekindles Wilde’s fascinating idea. Ultimately, Dorian is not a picture of evil, but a blank canvas for our own guilt, sins and desires.
Until September 25th
