Wilde bunch

How an Oscar Wilde classic has been reinvented as 21st-century theatre involving 26 characters performed by a cast of one.

- LINDA HERRICK

The Sydney Theatre Company's adaptation of Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is a timetravelling, gender-bending, high-tech explosion of wildly inventive thrills from start to finish.

But one of its most emblematic moments comes early, a little wink to the audience, saying, "Hey. We're just getting started."

"The famous scene is early on, the dinner-party scene," says Kip Williams, the company's artistic director and the brains behind the adaptation. It stars his friend, actor Eryn Jean (EJ) Norvill, as Dorian - as well as the other 25 characters in the play, which will be a highlight of this month's Auckland Arts Festival.

"EJ is sitting at a table with up to seven or eight different characters, all played by her," says Williams. "It's one performer creating simultaneously through pre-record and live performance all those characters, aged 19 to 90. But it is the lone performer guiding you through it."

Williams enjoys "the upending of reality. That's because it is seductive, and seduction is one of the motivators of the story, particularly with the relationship between Lord Henry and Dorian."

First published as a magazine story in 1890, then as a novella in 1891, Dorian Gray has a timeless relevance as a morality tale examining the psychopathy of narcissism.

Initially an innocent, Dorian is converted to a malignant world view by the wicked Lord Henry Wotton. When his artist friend Basil Hallward, who loves him, paints his portrait, Dorian makes a trade with his conscience: he will retain his external youthful beauty while the marks of his descent into Wotton-scale debauchery are transferred to the "portrait" for eternity.