WE START WITH A PICTURE: well, we would, given that Oscar Wilde’s quirky fin de siècle gothic horror, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is about the power of portraits and the quest for eternal youth, themes as old as the Greeks and as contemporary as the anti-aging mythology sold over a million beauty counters.
The balancing allegories of human frailty and vanity are timeless. But Dorian, while treated to sundry film adaptations, has not often graced the stage.
This may be because the baggy (andmore like Pirandello constructs than flesh-and-blood. We meet Dorian and his libertine influencer, Lord Henry Wotton, and Basil Hallward, whose image will free Dorian to pursue a life of untrammelled desire, while the picture in the attic records his crimes and awaits, like the day of judgement.
