Читать книгу The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde - Страница 9

All through his life, Wilde was obsessed with the idea of tragedy. In De Profundis, he tried to re-shape his messy, catastrophic affair with Douglas into a downfall of tragic proportions and trajectory, explicitly comparing himself at one point to a figure out of Sophocles. In Salome, he tried to seriously re-invent poetic tragedy as a valid contemporary theatrical form, and very nearly succeeded. Not content to be creatures of melodrama merely, the secret-riddled heroes and heroines of all of his plays (even of The Importance; who is Lady Bracknell, if not Nemesis herself?) often speak of themselves as being dogged by almost classical Furies of guilt and terror. This obsession was where I found my alibi for the idea that the passages of prose describing the picture should be spoken not by characters, but by the company stepping out of character and acting as a chorus. And once the company had become a chorus, I knew I then had a way of realising the extraordinarily suggestive (that word again) manner in which the novel both celebrates and damns its hero. Because it is always both within and without the action, a chorus’s function must always necessarily be ambiguous. In this case, the more they claim to be taking a merely documentary, story-telling approach to the proceedings – the more they insist that they are only there to act as witnesses and supply the odd fact or suggestion – the more they betray the fact that they seem to be somehow relishing their allotted task of personally chivvying, luring and tricking

Dorian to his pre-ordained death. To put it bluntly, they seem to feel about Dorian the same way as we do. They seem to know – somehow – that we want the pleasure of seeing this beautiful young man dare to commit all of these sins on our behalf, but also at the same time want the pleasure of seeing him appallingly punished (on our behalf) for committing them. Or should that be the other way round?

When they speak in their function as chorus, this script suggests that on occasion the ensemble drop the accents – the masks, if you like – of their characters. When the piece is produced elsewhere, this will have its own fresh implications, but in the auditorium of the Abbey, Ireland’s national theatre, the room for which this adaptation was created, this switch of accent had a very specific and entirely intentional effect. It meant hearing Wilde as an Irish voice. I knew from having already staged An Ideal Husband with a company of Irish actors at the Abbey that Irish voices of all kinds and classes often bring a peculiarly apt energy to Wilde’s writing, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that they have to deliver it in what is, to them, a foreign accent. As any voice coach will tell you, there are two elements to successfully assuming an accent which is not naturally your own; you have to get both the accent itself right, and (perhaps more importantly) you have to grasp this foreign voice’s essential music. Although the accent of Wilde’s writing is always that of his adopted London, the music (to my ear at least, and at least below the surface) is often deeply Irish. The trademark paradoxes aside, in his prose and in the longer speeches of his stage dialogue especially, there is often something in the sheer loquacity, in the sense of language as performance and especially in the highly distinctive drive through the full-stops to that all-important end of an extended paragraph that is a whole Irish Sea away from the clipped, tightly-corseted linguistic protocols of Belgravia and Chelsea. When it came to the “voicing” of the picture in this script, I simply wanted to unleash some of that music. I am well aware that this apparently simple shift of voice is in fact far from simple, and that it sets up all sorts of other echoes, and begs all sort of other questions. But in this story which is so much about surface and what lies beneath it, so much about what can and can’t be left behind when one re-invents oneself, it seemed entirely legitimate to make the public voices of Dorian’s world as scrupulously and artificially English as possible, while letting his most private life resonate with some of the sounds which his creator so ruthlessly ironed out of his own public voice when he emigrated and re-invented himself as the voice of not just society, but Society.