Читать книгу The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde - Страница 7

When you tell people that you are going to put Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray on the stage, they all promptly ask the same question; ‘So what does he look like?’

By way of an answer, I would merely point out to anyone considering casting the role that Dorian’s much-vaunted looks are, in the book, never described beyond a few generalities. They exist almost entirely in the variously smitten eyes of his beholders. What matters is what he does with those looks. Convention dictates that what is required for the part is a sort of glacial facial perfection and immobility – the approach made iconic by Hurd Hatfield in the 1945 MGM movie – but in fact what you need is a credibly twenty-year-old actor who can convincingly transform himself from a gauche innocent into a drug-addicted middle-aged psychopath. The point about Dorian is not that he doesn’t change, but rather that he does change – and horribly. Paradoxically, the gothic element of the plot that ought to be the hardest to bring off – the uncanny miracle that as the years advance Dorian acquires not one wrinkle – is, in a theatre performance, simply a given. Of course Dorian doesn’t look any older on the day Lord Henry Wotton dies than on the day that he met him, it’s only been less than two hours plus an interval since they first set eyes on each other.

Ideally, Dorian’s looks, like his money and class, must be got out of the way in the very first scene. They must be suggestive, not prescriptive. Only then can we concentrate on the how, not the why, of his Faustian career. Above all, we must never see Dorian making too much of an effort to seduce either the audience or the other characters. Like those of his female counterpart, Wedekind’s inexplicably attractive Lulu, his admirers must come to him already clutching their own deaths.