“I love acting,” says Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray. “It is so much more real than life.” In Daughters of Heaven the two teenage girls, Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker, find the lush musicals of Mario Lanza and the neo-gothic melodramas of James Mason much more real than the boring lives they lead in early 50s Christchurch.

In both plays in some of the scenes involving all the cast too many characters are over-caricatured (the society party in Dorian Gray) so that the plays lurch at times between a believable stage reality and a theatrical farrago, but some of the smaller roles are particularly well performed: Michael van Echten’s touching portrait of Herbert Rieper, Patrick Carroll’s Dr. Hulme, and Ingrid Saker’s Honora Rieper. Two stimulating evenings in the theatre.
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The Picture of Dorian Grey is a tribute to the beauty of youth, a love song to vanity and artifice, and a philosophical musing on morality, conscience and the soul. Oscar Wilde’s novel, published in 1890, is an incisive portrait of the hypocrisies of nineteenth century society, chock full of his signature epigrams and fiendish wit.

The story is of a young man of renowned beauty, Dorian Gray, who makes the wish that as he ages he shall remain youthful and handsome while his portrait ages and decays. This wish, born of vanity, is the beginning of Dorian’s journey from innocence to depravity.

Long Cloud Youth Theatre, under the direction of Willem Wassenaar, have created their own stage adaptation of the story for production at Downstage theatre. While the text supplies major roles for only five or six actors, the rest of the cast of sixteen fill minor parts and provide a chorus of narrators.

Ben Crawford shines as Lord Henry Wotton, the dissolute friend of Dorian who encourages him into degeneracy. Crawford’s Wotton is sardonic, foppish and charming; and he is also lucky enough to have all the best lines, making delightful Wildean pronouncements on the inadvisability of marriage, morals or acts of conscience. 

Kieran Charnock also stands out as James Vane, the brother of a girl driven to suicide by the cruelty of Dorian. Charnock’s performance is understated and refreshingly different, grounded energy to the stage. Joe Dekkers-Reihana, who plays Dorian Gray, is suitably beautiful but lacks the charisma necessary for me to believe that people would die for the love of him.

Wassenaar’s direction has the actor chorus seated in the front row, leaping up to join the action or spout narration as the occasion demands. While the staging offers some lovely images (the opening of the second half when all the cast lie prostrate on the ground, for example) the ‘actors as audience’ seems laboured and the opening and closing sequences involving ascent to and descent from the stage via the trapdoor are confusing. 

As with Daughters of Heaven, the scenography is spare and suggestive of the tone of period and location, rather than specificities. The set comprises a bare stage with a chaise longue and, in the second half, some long black curtains. I am surprised they choose not to include any material representation of the titular picture, choosing rather to represent it with lights. I can appreciate the difficulties of physicalising the portrait, but its absence bothers me. Or perhaps it is simply that I don’t like the lights that they used as its substitute.

Annie McKinley’s costumes mix modern and period items with mixed results. The foppish upper-class men in skinny jeans and flashy waistcoats are suitably dashing with a modern edge, but the singlet / hoopskirt look used for the women is less successful. 

This is the case for the production as a whole. It is of varied success. Accents are all over the place; the narrative sequences jolt. It appears as a vehicle for Ben Crawford as Lord Henry Wotton saying all of Oscar Wilde’s best lines while the rest of the group try to work a choric piece that simply doesn’t have enough characters to give the majority of them a real part.

It is an ambitious undertaking to try and transform a very literary text into visceral theatre. As an experiment this is intriguing and Long Cloud Youth Theatre attack it with their customary vim and vigour. Individual moments and performances make this production well worth a look. 
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