Читать книгу The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde - Страница 8

The second question that people ask – usually in gleeful anticipation of throwing you into a panicked tangle of bluff and promise – is; ‘So, how are you going to do the picture?’

Well, every production must find its own solution, and much as I would hope that any future production of this script will pay little regard to my stage directions and concentrate on finding its own response to the imagery of the original story, this adaptation does come with a built-in proposition as to how the picture of the title is to be realised. (Please note; if you are an audience member reading this introduction before you see the show tonight, then it might be wise to stop reading now). One of the strongest tricks of Wilde’s story is its suggestiveness – indeed, in some crucial ways the story might even be said to be about the power of suggestion. As Lord Henry Wotton puts it in the speech that triggers Dorian’s fatal wish that he may never age, ‘It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place….’ And Lord Henry is right; almost all of the novel’s horrors are left – cleverly and insidiously – to the reader’s deliberately inflamed imagination. Every crime that Dorian is accused of – the drugs, the suicides, the homosexuality, the bisexuality, the orgies, the adultery, the blackmail – remain, largely, just that, accusations. Little is laid down in black and white, much is hinted at – in confessions, in salacious hints, in gossip and in rumour. With the exception of Basil Hallward’s murder, we never actually see him at work on anyone’s flesh. Likewise, the picture of the title is mostly left in the mind’s eye. Basil’s style of painting for instance is left completely unspecified – is he as radical an artist as Wilde’s contemporary Whistler was, or as skilfully formulaic as Carolus Duran – or as somewhere-in-between as John Singer Sargeant, in whose work flattery and authenticity are often indistinguishable? We are never told. Although the very first changes to his masterpiece’s painted surface are subtly and economically evoked, it is never thereafter described in anything approaching detail – even the family portraits that hang in Dorian’s country house are more accurately described. This trick of suggestiveness works a very particular kind of spell, and one that is essential to the story’s success. By making his readers imagine the corruption of the picture, Wilde makes us subtly and uncannily complicit in that corruption, and therefore in Dorian’s also. The logic is that of all seducers: if we can imagine his sins, then surely we can also imagine committing them ourselves – and if we can imagine that, then surely on some (perhaps unconscious?) level that must mean that we want to commit them? That is why, in this staging, the picture is done suggestively; with nothing but Wilde’s original words. Like a conjuror insisting that he has nothing up his sleeve, my script starts the evening by showing the audience a provocatively blank (if diabolically black) canvas. Then, every time that Dorian looks at it, the actors paint that canvas with strokes and fragments of Wilde’s prose. Simple as that.

This device also has the great virtue of economy. It means that the budget can be spent on actors, not in the props department. It also honours the fact that it is to hear Wilde’s language that people have bought their tickets, not to see a bit of scene painting or (these days) a video installation. It is his way with words that an audience wants to experience – that extraordinary, idiosyncratic phrasing, with its apparently undiminished ability (in both its high comic and the lower, melodramatic, gothic modes) to outrage propriety and embody transgression.