Download Resource Notes for The Picture of Dorian Gray

Resource Notes for The Picture of Dorian Gray
Resource Notes for The Picture of Dorian Gray
Introduction: By Fiach.
Who is Oscar Wilde?
Oscar Wilde was a playwright, poet, essayist, novelist and celebrity in the late Victorian
period in England. He said once “I put all my genius into my life, I put only my talent into my
work”. Wilde’s life and work are intrinsically connected. One might not be able to tell where
Wilde’s persona began and the person ended. Wilde plays were hugely successful and he
became a celebrated public figure in Victorian London. He said “the man that can dominate
a London dinner table can dominate the world”, no doubt referring e to himself. His celebrity
turned to infamy in 1895 when he was tried and convicted of having sexual relations with
men.
Wilde, however, was always something of an outsider. He was an Irish Nationalist, having
been influenced by his mother, a poet and an activist who wrote for The Nation under the
pen name Speranza. When he was a student at Oxford he deliberately marked himself out as
different to his English upper-class peers. He flirted with Roman Catholicism and went to
the trouble signing in at the gates of Magdalene College in his full name, Oscar Fingal
O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. A name which, not only took up two full lines on the page of the
ledger, but which was also unmistakably foreign.
So beneath the amusing charm of Wilde’s wit there is a barbed satire of the Victorian ruling
classes. Wilde was a proponent of socialism, Irish nationalism and a homosexual who
showed the powerful elite an ugly reflection of themselves, using clever, quotable paradoxes
to make his point. When Wilde, in the guise of Henry Wotton, says "conscience and
cowardice are really the same things. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all",
his point is made all the more cutting for its humour.
When A Picture of Dorian Gray was first published, with its barely veiled references to
homosexuality, it was met with staunch and moralistic criticism. Wilde wrote a preface to the
second edition, defending it, saying that there could be no such thing as moral or immoral
book. A book, he said, is either well written or badly written and that is the only criterion by
which it ought to be judged. This preface is now famous in its own right and is one of the
most important texts espousing the tenets of Aestheticism (see below)
Wilde, like Dorian, led a double life. On the surface he was a family man with a wife and
children, but he secretly engaged male prostitutes with his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The
couple were constantly harassed by Douglas’ father, the Marques of Queensbury, who
disapproved of the relationship. In 1895, at Douglas’ urging, Wilde took Queensbury to
court. The true details of their affair emerged in the trial and Wilde was later tried and
convicted of gross indecency. Wilde’s glittering career ended in imprisonment and ignominy.
Having served his sentence, Wilde lived in France in lonely, self-imposed exile for three
years before dying of an ear infection in 1900.
As Neil Bartlett points out in the introduction to this adaptation, Dorian and Alfred Douglas
bare an uncanny resemblance – not just in how Wilde describes them physically, but in their
tastes, social position and airs. However, Wilde didn’t meet the man who would bring about
his downfall until after the publication of A Picture of Dorian Gray. So “Dorian is not a
reflection of Wilde’s life” says Bartlett, “but an uncanny anticipation of it. He may be a
complete fiction, but for the man who created him he turned out to be horribly and
inescapably real”
Aestheticism
Aestheticism is a philosophy of art that was popular in the nineteenth century. It espoused
the idea that art is for art’s sake. Aesthetes said that art cannot be judged as moral or
immoral, but only as beautiful or not beautiful. One cannot judge a piece of art by the social
or political values it purports because art is not instructional or useful, its only purpose is to
be aesthetically exciting. Following the moralistic criticism of its first publication, Wilde’s
preface to the second edition of A Picture of Dorian Gary has become the most famous
articulation of the aestheticism movement, with its final, memorable line “We can forgive a
man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a
useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless”.
Synopsis
The play begins in the studio of Basil Hallward, who is being visited by his friend Lord Henry
Wotton. A large painting is placed in the room and a member of the chorus speaks the words
“All art is quite useless”
Lord Henry is praising Basil’s portrait of Dorian Gray as his best work yet. Basil reluctantly
explains how he met Dorian and how he became infatuated with him and that he won’t
display the portrait because he is afraid he has shown in it “the secret of [his] own soul”.
The beautiful and gauche Dorian arrives for the final sitting of his portrait and Lord Henry
shares his philosophy for living with Dorian. He says that one should give in to one’s
impulses and that it is only the fear of society and the fear of God that stops us from doing so
and realising “one’s nature perfectly”. Dorian is both seduced and fearful of what Lord Henry
says, being reminded of his own secret desires of which he is ashamed.
Looking at the beautiful painting, Dorian is saddened by the inevitable decline of his own
beauty. Dorian wishes that the painting could grow old and he could be forever young. For
this, he says, he would give his soul. Unbeknownst to Dorian, a pact is made.
At the theatre a month later, Dorian is introduced to Henry’s wife. It seems that Henry and
Dorian have been spending a lot of time together and Lord Henry and his wife lead separate
lives.
While having dinner, Dorian tells Lord Henry about Sybil Vane, an actress with whom
Dorian says he has fallen in love. He has gone to see her performance every night in an
unfashionable East-End theatre and wants Henry and Basil to come and see her show. Sybil
is working, at her mother’s insistence, in order to pay her brother’s fare to the Australia.
Sybil’s brother, James, is sceptical of the advances of Dorian, who has been sending flowers
but not identifying himself. James says that if this man does her wrong he will return from
Australia and kill him.
To Basil and Henry’s surprise, they are notified of Dorian’s engagement to Sybil Vane.
However, that night at the theatre, Sybil performs very badly. She explains to Dorian that
this is because, having now experienced love with him, she could not believe in the artifice of
the theatre and stopped being a good actress. Dorian, now that she has become a terrible
artist, falls out of love with Sybil. She begs him not to leave and threatens that her brother
will kill him if he does. He does leave.
Alone with his portrait the next morning, Dorian sees that it has changed slightly, it has
become less beautiful. He writes Sybil a letter asking for forgiveness. But it is too late. Lord
Henry comes with news that Sybil has committed suicide. Dorian takes responsibility for her
death, saying that he has murdered her. But Lord Henry persuades him not to feel guilty,
saying that the events of life are merely to be observed from afar and that Sybil’s death “was
all simply a scene from some strange, tragic play”. Dorian takes solace in this and goes to the
opera that night.
Basil visits Dorian and wishes to see the portrait. Dorian refuses to let him. Basil confesses
that he has very strong feelings for Dorian and that this fact is revealed in the painting of
Dorian’s portrait. Dorian callously dismisses him and has the portrait moved to the top of his
house. In the attic, Dorian now sees that it has changed again following his meeting with
Basil.
Dorian continues to live a decadent life. Allowing his impulses to govern his actions, he grabs
his servant, Victor, and kisses him violently. We later see Victor being bundled out of the
scene by thugs.
On his 38th birthday, Dorian’s looks still have not changed and he throws himself a lavish
party. At the party, Basil confronts Dorian about the rumours of his immoral behaviour, and
how his relationships with young men and married women seem to lead to their destruction.
Dorian takes Basil up to the attic and shows him the painting which, by now, has become a
hideous display of his sins. Basil is horrified and Dorian kills him as he says The Lord’s
Prayer. Dorian blackmails a former friend, Dr. Alan Campbell, into disposing of Basil’s body.
Dorian goes to the theatre. Little has changed in the 20 years since we last saw these
characters in the theatre except that everyone seems to have deteriorated – apart from
Dorian. While chatting, Dorian is haunted by the ghosts of Basil and Alan Campbell, who we
learn has killed himself. Dorian is distressed and rushes off.
Dorian, drug addicted and frightened by spectres, goes to a brothel and takes opium. He is
recognised by a sailor, one of the other clients. The sailor is James Vane. James is about to
kill Dorian when Dorian persuades him that he can’t be the man he’s looking for, since he is
so young looking and the crime was committed years ago. James is told by one of the
prostitutes that Dorian is, in fact, over forty years old but it’s too late, Dorian has
disappeared.
Dorian escapes to his country residence where is joined by Henry and Lady Monmouth, an
American heiress with whom he has had an affair and who is trying to rekindle the
relationship. She is not succeeding. They chat about a beater who has been accidentally killed
on Dorian’s land when he stepped out in front of the hunters. Dorian considers this a bad
omen and is in a nervous state. He then learns that the dead man was not a beater, but
James Vane. He declares that he is safe.
Another 10 years passes. Henry is sick and Dorian is visiting him in a sanatorium. Dorian
tells Henry that he has resolved to be good from now on. Henry doesn’t think much of this
idea and praises, with certain envy, the life Dorian has had. This only serves to strengthen
Dorian’s resolve to change his ways. And he says goodbye to Henry, who later dies.
Dorian, back at his home, is tormented by the ghosts of his victims. They mock him for his
new desire to be good and persuade him to go up to the attic and look at the portrait. He does
and it has become more horrible than ever. Dorian takes a knife, the same knife with which
he killed Basil, and slashes the painting. This wounds the real Dorian and he dies.
Characters
Dorian Gray. We hear about Dorian before we see him. He is described as a man of such
extraordinary beauty that he both absorbs and terrifies Basil Hallward. When we meet him
we discover him to be gauche young man, quite unaware of the extent of the affect he has on
people. Basil says he feels as if he has given his “whole soul away to someone who treats it as
if it were a flower to put on his coat.” This youthful superficiality is to be Dorian’s downfall.
His beauty is, at once, his blessing and his curse. For it is while looking at the painting of his
own mythical beauty, that he regrets that he will grow old while it will stay the same, and
then makes a pact to preserve his superficial beauty at any expense. He goes on to live a life
of decadent indulgence at the expense of his soul, while always appearing youthful and
unsullied. As the portrait takes on the appearance of his sin, Dorian says to his mentor in
hedonism, Henry Wotton, “I wish I could love. Or escape. Or… forget” and he realises the
expense that his beauty has been bought for and is eventually driven to destroy himself.
Lord Henry Wotton. Lord Henry is the play’s central corrupting figure. He sews the first
seeds of hedonism in Dorian’s mind, having identified the secret desires he harbour, and
gives him permission to act on impulse without concern for the affect it may have on others.
Lord Henry is married but, it seems, is somewhat estranged from his wife who remarks that
she “always hears Harry’s opinions from his friends.” Henry takes Dorian under his wing, as
a kind of apprentice, who becomes a “polished reflection of his tutor”. Henry is Wilde’s
mouth-piece in the book. He is a font of the delightful, paradoxical reflections on life which
for which Wilde was known. For example, “My dear boy it is people who only love once who
are shallow. What they call fidelity, I call lack of imagination.” However, as with Wilde,
Wotton’s quips are amusing on their face but actually hide dark, radical and subversive
ideas. In the end, Henry is Dorian’s only friend. He is so completely taken by Dorian’s
surface beauty that he seems to be the only one who cannot see past it to the monster he has
become.
Basil Hallward. Basil is the artist of the portrait of Dorian Gray. He admits to Dorian that
his admiration for him was so strong and with “more romance of feeling than a man usually
gives or should ever give to a friend” that it was revealed in the painting he made of him. And
so, he says, could never display it because He has shown in it “the secret of my own soul”.
Basil, while good friends with Henry Wotton, is very wary of him and his ideas. He is
reluctant to introduce him the beautiful ingenious, Dorian Gray. When Basil asks himself
why he likes the dastardly Lord Henry so much, Henry responds; “because I represent to you
all of the sins you have never had the courage to commit”. Perhaps in this way, we may see a
lot of ourselves in Basil; he is moderate, moral and has a basic empathy for those he shares
the world with. But there is dark desire beneath it all which he is repressing in favour of his
morality.
Sybil Vane/Duchess of Monmouth. These two characters are, in this production, played
by the same performer. Sybil Vane is a young and beautiful actress with whom Dorian falls in
love and becomes his first victim. She is a working class girl who is working to pay for her
brother’s passage to Australia and is, by Dorian’s account, a remarkable actress. However,
once they have declared their real love for each other, Sybil is confronted by the absurd
artifice of theatrical love and ceases to be a convincing actress. Her sincerity does her no
good in Dorian’s eyes, who casts her off. The Duchess of Monmouth is an American heiress
who married a Duke for his title. She has an affair with Dorian, but, as with everyone else, he
discards her when he is no longer interested. The Duchess is the symbol of the rising global
power of America in the twentieth century which would eventually end the aristocratic way
of life altogether – and end lives like Dorian Gray’s. Both Monmouth and Sybil show us the
power that Dorian’s mythical beauty has over people.
Chorus. The chorus are an ever-present force in the production. They serve the show in
many different ways. They address the audience directly as narrators, they serve as the voice
of Dorian’s demons who echo words that torment him, they emphasise certain physical
action by mirroring it so that it has a sort-of ripple effect across the stage, they populate the
different worlds of the play, but mostly, they serve as silent witnesses to the events of the
story and Dorian’s crimes. They are, in some way, the audience’s representatives on stage.
Many of them are working class people, the servants of the play’s main characters, including
Francis who is reminiscent of the butlers in Wilde’s plays. He sees and hears everything in
the house and is the picture of stoical discretion – but into Francis’ non judgemental
presence, a guilty soul might read their own guilt.
When the chorus narrate the story to the audience, often speaking into microphones, they
drop character and speak in their own, mostly, Irish accents. Bartlett had a particular reason
for this directorial decision. He says that to his ears, “the music [of Wilde’s language] is often
deeply Irish” in spite of the manner and “accent” being of his adopted London. To have the
contrast between the life Dorian creates for himself in an affected upper-class English accent,
while be privately haunted by demons in Irish accents, was a suitable mirror of Wilde’s own
story.
Themes
Hedonism and Advertising
“I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure.”
-Dorian
Dorian Gray lives a life of hedonism – a life in pursuit of pleasure at the expense of all else,
including morality - and it destroys his soul, and eventually destroys his body. Lord Henry
Wotton is the play’s main proponent of the philosophy of hedonism. He tells Dorian that
“the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick
with longing for the things it has forbidden itself”. Lord Henry says that it is society and
religion that cause people to fear their instincts, not nature.
Living a life purely in the pursuit of personal pleasure, Dorian sacrifices the beauty of his
soul and so his beauty is merely surface beauty. The aspect of Dorian which is the picture in
the attic, the aspect which is out of sight to all but him, is hideously decayed by ugly sin.
This production of A Picture of Dorian Gray asks questions about the contemporary culture
and its emphasis on surface beauty, without pause for thought about a deeper beauty. Neil
Bartlett, the director of this production, in his piece on the Guardian’s blog on 8th October,
uses the example of the Abercrombie and Fitch poster on Dublin’s Dame Street to illustrate a
point.
It is a three-story high, naked, muscular, male torso – with the face out of shot. It’s an
impossible ideal (much like Dorian’s unfading surface) and, as Bartlett says, it suggests that
the kind of liberation from shame that’s required to be naked and three-stories tall on a busy
shopping street, can be bought in a shop. In Dorian’s case, the liberation came not from a
purchase, but from a mysterious trade he makes as a young man. However, as beautiful as
he may have looked, beauty is harder won than a purchase in a shop or a magic trick.
Bartlett goes on to say “Sometimes I stand for a bit and wonder if the poster-boy on Dame
Street has a picture in his attic even uglier than Dorian’s, rotten with the commercial
hijacking of pleasure and the commercial negation of individuality.”
-Is Dorian a perfect innocent before he meets Henry Wotton or is Dorian pre-disposed to a
hedonistic lifestyle?
-What products or services have you noticed that are marketed at you? What products or
services have you noticed that are marketed groups of people that don’t include you? What
are the differences between them?
-Should you be able to do whatever you want? What stops you from doing what you want?
Superficiality
“I do love acting. It is so much more real than life.” – Lord Henry Wotton
The portrait takes on Dorian’s secret sins so that he can be, in appearance, beautiful and
virtuous while in fact he is living at the cost of his soul and so the total picture of Dorian Gray
cannot be seen, only the most beautiful, but superficial, fragment of him. “Society cannot
believe anything to a man’s dishonour” says Dorian, “if he has still the look of one kept
unspotted by the world”
Sybil Vane, the actress with whom Dorian falls in love and then callously dismisses is not
made for a world in which the surface does not match up to what’s underneath. To her
delight, she discovers that when she falls in love, the performance she has been giving in
Romeo and Juliet is empty and ridiculous. Having experienced real love for the first time,
the fantasy of the theatre is broken and its artifice is exposed to her so she becomes an
unconvincing actress. Sybil pays the price for her sincerity, as Dorian wants nothing to do
with her once she stops being a god actress. Once she fails as an artist who creates beautiful
surfaces, she is no use to Dorian Gray and she kills herself in grief.
In the final scene between Dorian and Lord Henry, it seems Henry is Dorian’s only friend
left. He is the only person who has not, by now, seen the corruption of Dorian’s soul and
Henry praises the life Dorian has lead, saying “What an exquisite life you have had. Nothing
has been hidden from you….and it has all been to you no more than the sound of music. You
are still the same.” Dorian says he is not the same, now fully aware of the whole of the picture
of himself, including the portrait in the attic. But the old and blinded Henry can see only the
superficial Dorian and not the whole of him.
-Why is Henry the only remaining friend to Dorian by the end of the play? What is it about
Henry that admires Dorian so much?
-Do you look forward to getting older?
-Do you treat attractive people differently?
-Can you think of a time when you had to present yourself in a particular way, a job
interview or in an argument, for example? What did you have to do in order to succeed at
that? Was that dishonest? Was it superficial?
Social Status
“There were some carters, on their way to Covent Garden, and I wondered what they
thought of me; whether they knew anything of this city’s splendour and its shame…its
fierce, fiery-coloured joys, its horrible hunger. What a strange London they see…a city free
from the smoke of night and the sin of day; a pallid, ghost-like city. I envied them
everything they did not know.” - Dorian
The main characters’ lives are ostentatiously expensive and decadent. Their clothes are
beautiful, their houses are large, and they employ servants. What they do to earn the money
to pay for this lifestyle, is conspicuous by its absence in the play. They are the ruling class of
Victorian England who have inherited aristocratic titles and vast fortunes which sustain
them. Though they do seem to have a sense of each other’s relative means, as Dorian’s family
wealth is discussed by the ladies in the theatre foyer who quip “Young people nowadays
imagine money is everything...and when they grow older, they know it.”
Dorian seems to have infinite wealth, as he throws parties, maintains town and country
homes and pays off the witnesses to his crimes, almost without thinking about it. This stands
in contrast with the mainly silent onlookers, those who serve play’s main characters. They
live in a separate world, one of servitude rather than self-servitude, people for whom Lord
Henry’s philosophies for living are a practical impossibility. This fact is clear when Lord
Henry says “No civilised man ever regrets a pleasure, just as no uncivilised man ever knows
what a pleasure is” before he calls for his footman, Lane, to get him a cab.
Part of the freedom that Dorian’s wealth affords him is the freedom to cross social strata and
pursue pleasure in all corners of society. Dorian can go to the opera with Dukes, take opium
with prostitutes, avail of rent boys, seduce an actress in an East-end theatre and sexually
abuse his servant, then have him disappear when he begins to displease him. His wealth and
social status, as well as his unblemished physical beauty, allow him to extract the pleasure he
wants from his life. Dorian says, to his servant Victor, “Society is never very ready to believe
anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating” before kissing him
aggressively and drawing blood.
Neil Bartlett, in directing A Picture of Dorian Gray, paid particular attention to creating a
tangibly different physicality and vocal quality in the different worlds of the play. Although
the same actors play the ladies of the theatre foyer, the servants and the prostitutes of
Limehouse, Bartlett, the cast and voice director Andrea Ainsworth, created a different
physical and vocal language for the dwellers in each of these separate worlds so that the
audience have a sense of the contrast Dorian’s journey between them.
-Do all people have a right to be treated equally? Why?
-Is there a class system in Ireland or is that just a featured of British society?
-Do rich people in Ireland today live like Dorian Gray?
Complicity
“Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at
their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.” –Preface to the Second
Edition
As Bartlett says in the introduction to this adaptation, there is actually very little information
given in A Picture of Dorian Gray about what Dorian looks like. Similarly, the portrait itself
is scarcely described and yet, people have quite clear ideas in their mind’s eye about what
they look like but, in truth, the mind’s eye is simply that of the beholder. We all have our own
personal Dorian Gray. We invent him based on the suggestions that Wilde gives us, leaving
us to fill in the rest.
Not only do we imagine our own pictures of Dorian Gray but we also imagine his crimes,
Bartlett says. If you were to ask someone with a passing knowledge of the story, or even
someone who had read the book some time ago, ‘what are the crimes of which Dorian is
accused?’ They might mention drugs, homosexuality, and the suicides that he causes – all of
which are merely suggested in the book. By asking us to fill in the particular details with that
which stands for ‘beauty’ and ‘crime’ for us, Wilde is revealing to us our own desires and
fears.
When we participate in imagining these things, we become complicit in the story’s moral
traps. In a way, the critics of A Picture of Dorian Gray weren’t blustering about the morality
of the piece itself, but rather appalled by their own visions of a sumptuously beautiful young
man and his debauched crimes. Lord Henry’s assessment of why Basil likes him so much
could well apply to us all; “because I represent to you all of the sins you have never had the
courage to commit”. Dorian Gray is the reader’s Rorschach test.
The theatre is a medium which requires very active audience participation and makes the
audience complicit in its creation– and so Dorian Gray is very well suited to theatrical
adaptation, particularly this one by Neil Bartlett. In the theatre, not everything can be fully
realistically rendered and if it was, it would be doing all of the work for the audience. In the
theatre the artists represent, rather than realise. In a production such as this, with a stripped
down set - in which a jump from one location to another might be suggested by an
atmospheric change and the movement of a table and where the performers speak directly to
the audience - the spectators are very active participants in the experience. They imagine
that which the minimal set stands for and are never allowed to become passive absorbers of
the experience, but rather, always have to be active creators of that experience.
-What did you know about A Picture of Dorian Gray before you saw the production in the
Abbey? Or, if you have not seen the production yet; what did you know about it before
reading this resource pack? What was your own vision of Dorian Gray? What does he look
like? What is his manner like? Who, that you know, is he most like?
Appendix 1
Dorian Gray Abbey Theatre Workshop Outline
120 Minutes
Aims:
To prepare the group for the piece they’re going to see. By the end of the workshop the
participants should be equipped to question the piece. In particular the workshop should:
-introduce and contextualize the theme of Hedonism
-introduce and contextualize Wilde’s particular language
-give an insight into how the piece was made (chorus work – the various effects that can have
on an audience’s perception; status, highlighting certain moments, how does that tell the
story?)
Face Morph (10 mins)
Get into pairs, preferably someone you don’t know. Assign yourselves an “A” and “B”. B sits
and A stands facing them. B is to be as neutral as possible. They look into each other’s eyes.
There may be giggles. That’s fine. Acknowledge it, let it happen, deep breaths, move on.
A looks into B’s eyes, then around their eyes, then widening their attention to the upper half
of their face, taking in the details, getting to know them, then the lower half of the face, then
the face as a whole. Take it all in.
Then A, with the whole of B’s face in focus, allows themselves to see their face differently.
Allow their eyes to change shape, their mouth to move place, their beard to grow, their
eyebrows to thicken. Don’t force it, just let it come. It doesn’t have to come immediately.
Treat it like a magic eye trick and it will happen.
Then suggest that you imagine their face as the face of someone who’s lived life lived kindly...
and after a time when they have done that, ask them to imagine the face morphing again, this
time to the face of someone who has lived life cruelly.
Hedonism – text talk (30 mins)
Form a circle. Ask for people who are happy to read aloud. Give them a piece of this text to
read aloud.
The aim of life is self-development, Mr Gray; to realise one’s
nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for.
People are afraid of themselves, nowadays - they are charitable,
they feed the hungry and clothe the beggar, but they have
forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to
one’s self. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, and
the terror of God, which is the basis of religion – these are the
two things that govern us.
And yet... I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully
and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to
every thought, reality to every dream, the world would gain such
an impulse of joy…….
Passions that have made you afraid; thoughts that have filled
you with terror; day dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere
memory might stain your cheeks with shame...
Start a discussion based on this extract, including the following questions.
-What’s important to you?
-What are the things you must do with your life?
-Is a painting or a button hole important?
-What would your life be like if beauty was your highest value?
-Is it ok to do what you want?
Wilde’s Aphorisms (15min)
Oscar Wilde is known for his wonderfully paradoxical aphorisms such as:
“I can resist anything except temptation”
“All women become their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, that is theirs”.
"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing
that is worth knowing can be taught."
This exercise allows people to come up with their own Wildean aphorisms. Divide into small
groups and ask each group to come up with some general statements on common subjects
for example “Work” “Beauty” or “the Abbey”. The results will be something like :
“The Abbey Theatre claims to produce Irish work”
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”
“Work is something to live for”
You then ask them to look through their general statements and follow it up with some form
of inversion of the generally true statement. So for example:
“The Abbey claims to produce Irish work but Irish work produced the Abbey”
“Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but sometimes the beholder is blind”
“Work is something to live for but work can bring you to your grave.”
You then ask them to make some form of comment on the previous statements. So, for
example:
“The Abbey claims to produce Irish work, but Irish work produced the Abbey. It is the
people, not buildings, who make art.”
“Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but sometimes the beholder is blind. Blind
beholders make the best critics.”
“Work is something to live for because it can bring you to you grave. No amount of
relaxation will ever do that for you”
Chorus (20 mins)
-walk around the space
-imagine the floor is on a fulcrum; you have to keep it balanced but keep moving
-stop when I clap my hands. Start walking again, everybody at the same time. Look for a
silent agreement. Feel it. Go with conviction.
(Then ask half of them to step out and watch this)
-Now when I clap my hands, quickly form a tableau facing the audience. Everybody has to
be touching at least one other. Vary the levels. (Try this a few times, offering suggestions)
-Form a tableau. Everybody look at a fixed point (you decide). Over a slow count of 8,
everybody look at a different point (you decide). Then, on a snap, everybody except one
person (you decide) looks back to the first point. (Repeat if necessary)
Ask the audience: How did my instruction affect the picture? What do you see? What’s
going on in this picture? (Look for story, relationships and mood in their responses – we
want them to create little scenes)
(Swap over groups, repeat the exercise)
-Now, starting from the point of contact with the person next to you, on a count of 8, move
in to a different position in the tableau, never losing contact with the group. On 8, settle
and look at a fixed point.
Try a few different combinations, asking the audience to read in subtext. Who are these
people? What are the hierarchies? What are the agendas?
Swap groups. Repeat exercise form tableau, get them moving in unison.
Text and Chorus (20 mins)
Then ask one person to read the first half of the text on stage, off to one side, while the
chorus move.
Ask the audience what this adds to the text? Is there a clear Lord Henry? Is there a Dorian?
Where is this set?
See if a director emerges. Nominate them to direct the chorus’ movement to the text being
spoken.
Swap groups. Repeat exercise with the second half of the text.
Composition (15 mins)
Divide them into their groups (the director and text reader have now swapped groups)
Give them 10 minutes to prepare a series of still images (tableau) with transitions between
them, as before, which in some way illustrate the text they’ve been given.
Come back with a composed piece to show the groups.
Reflection (10 mins)
Go back over questions that have been raised in the workshop so far. Refer to the aims of the
workshop at the top of this workshop outline.
Appendix 2 – Rehearsal Blog by Assistant Director, Oonagh
Murphy
Blog 1
Neil Bartlett stands before the assembled staff on the first read-through of his new
adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. First read-through mornings at the Abbey are
notoriously nerve-inducing events, an atmosphere which Neil dispels immediately, telling
the crowd that he met Wilde this morning while walking across the green of Trinity College.
An avid Wildean scholar, director and long-time adapter, Bartlett has encounter Wilde many
times before, and I certainly take this Monday morning’s encounter as further confirmation,
if the script itself is not already sufficient evidence, that this production is a meeting of great
minds. The Abbey staff sits back as the company, with several debuts and many well-known
faces, read the script dynamically, a radio-play that promises much of its fully staged
production.
As Neil suggests, everyone thinks they know the story of Dorian Gray. It has left a residue on
contemporary culture – the well-known phrase ‘She’s got a picture in the attic’ just one
example. He goes on to explain how this production will be about meeting those expectations
and starting a conversation with them. ‘Why do people book tickets to Wilde?’ Sofas, potted
plants, stylish lives and pithy quips... Certainly, this production will satisfy that appetite for
style, as designer Kandis Cooke and Neil have devised costumes changes with plenty of
frocks and ‘enough feathers to depopulate an aviary’. The company are shown the stage
design, bearing the hallmarks of the director’s ability to combine confident economy with
arresting theatricality; ‘it’s about assembling what’s needed to tell the story’ and ‘relying on a
simple visual language for character changes’. This is a tragedy in the classical sense. We
encounter a hero with a particular problem, and around him are characters who engage with
him but who also are invested in the story and seem to know how it ends. What appears to
interest Neil specifically, is the audience’s relationship to Dorian, via this ensemble, do we
want him to get away with it?
The rest of the day is saturated with snatches of insight into how far along in its inception
this production is in Neil’s mind. Sometimes as an assistant director, there is an
overwhelming feeling that you are in a master-class, and that some of these ideas are ones
you will return to repeatedly in your own work. We discuss the dynamics of the piece – the
ability of using the chorus to pause, fast forward and magnify behaviour. The thriller quality
of the work is highlighted – what is the accumulatory effect of death in this saga with a
thrillingly high body count? Neil outlines how we will rehearse this massive production,
specifically highlighting the work that will be done with Voice Director Andrea Ainsworth, in
developing a speaking ensemble that drives the story to its end.
I scribble notes and hope I will be able to read them later.
Blog 2
‘There is something about this story that is written in blood’ – Neil Bartlett.
Our first session as a company, without staff or creative team present, Neil asks us each to
pick out a line that has stuck in our head from the read-through. ‘What did you not notice
before?’ This returned some really interesting snapshots of the play. Hearing certain lines
ring out in the voices of these actors, lines that had struck them brought the play into live
discussion...
‘Eternal youth. Infinite passion’.
‘I can’t afford orchids but I spare no expense in strangers and foreigners’.
‘I envy them everything they did not know’ ...
Everyone’s subjective response was valid.
We retell the story, taking it in turns to engage the room with a chapter of the play before
passing over to someone else. Neil proposes that within the play there is ‘an idea cooking
that we all have a Dorian inside us’. There is something about this saga that people identify
with personally, and this comes through in this collective retelling of it.
This kind of high-focus group work is the backbone Neil of how intends to work on this
piece. Over the course of the next few days, he repeatedly says things along the lines – ‘Don’t
give people time to think’. What he means is, don’t get caught in the trap of analysis and
discussion. Exercises that demand forward momentum allow the text to become something
embodied, rather than cerebral – the muscularity of Wilde’s prose to become workable
material, as opposed to venerated and unyielding.
The one concept of this production is to tell the story, and to tell it clearly, to root all the
work in the idea of language with trajectory. An hour’s full company voice work every
morning with voice director Andrea is a good place to begin this.
Andrea has a kit-bag of exercises that make simple some really challenging ideas about the
actor’s voice in approaching text like this. The actors warm up all areas of their bodies,
connecting breath and noise, to an external target. She encourages them to be specific about
where the sound is travelling, to one another. ‘Each sound has a beginning and an ending’.
So definition lends physicality into otherwise purely oral exercises.
What is interesting is how important it is to develop connection within an ensemble early on.
Connecting sound to physicality, connecting eyes to breath, and connecting with an external
target, other people – these are challenging but essential exercises. They form the basis of
good chorus dynamic, encouraging limberness and an ability to sustain momentum onstage
together that is both economic and energised.
Neil continues with this through-line on chorus voice work. He asks the group in a circle to
say ‘Good morning to one another’, swapping places as they say it. They then say the phrase
one after another, with the instruction of putting a comma in between each person’s go, so
that the long list of ‘Good mornings’ is lightly punctuated but continuous. The same,
surprisingly difficult task (‘that sounded more like a full-stop than a comma’) is repeated
with the group in various formations, a line, a clump, a wedge with one person at the top.
The work then turns to a passage of text from the novel. Text is divided by the circle, with
each person speaking a phrase (the text between two commas). The text flows through the
circle, with each actor observing the beginning and ending of each phrase. They are asked to
notice how far away the end of their sentence is – that is, how much further forward do they
need to extend the energy?
Neil works like an orchestra conductor, controlling dynamic mainly with his own physicality
– an arm, a finger, his eyes – but often issuing direct instructions – ‘Less speaking, more
thinking’, ‘Don’t let any more out than comes to you’, ‘Keep a lid on it more’. This work on
the nature of comma in text is not arbitrary. The analogy of each voice of the chorus being
similar to one domino in a line is articulated repeatedly by the director. The comma controls
the forward momentum of passages spoken collectively.
The central question here is – what is the character of the chorus? The work moves to
explore this more closely. The company are asked to walk across the floor given various
instructions – walk towards Neil with a feeling of welcome, walk towards Neil with a secret
in your head that you would never tell him, walk towards Neil with a weapon behind your
back that are considering using etc.
Other exercises involve paired work moving from one emotion to another within a
movement of the hand across face. The pairs are grouped together until one half of the
company watches the other complete the exercise. What we observe is how group work like
this allows for a variety of intensity and interpretations of emotion. This grit – the
combination of individual faces and bodies – is the basis of a strong chorus that are live and
present.
What is the nature of this body of people? Both promising and threatening, knowing and
nonchalant. Neil assures us that all of this is up for play, and that’s an exciting place to be on
Day Three.
Blog 3
The Picture of Dorian Gray explores the clash of social values of the Victorian and Edwardian
eras. Dorian, in his determination to follow his curiosity, as Lord Henry instructs him, finds
himself in parts of London that a gentlemen would rarely go to, mixing with sorts of people
who someone of his class would otherwise never interact. The play has within it comment
about wealth and grandeur, and its relationship to the working class and criminal
underground.
‘Society is never very ready to believe anything that is to the detriment of those who are
both rich and fascinating; it feels instinctively that manners are more important than
morals’ - The Picture of Dorian Gray.
In order to help the actors to inhabit these various worlds, Neil leads sessions with each
social groups – the Ladies of the Theatre Foyer, the people of the working class Poplar
theatre where Sybil Vane performs, the prostitutes of Limehouse. Each session takes
different shape, but the essence of the work is the same. The focus is to get the groups
sharing a physical language and exploring the text in a way that is embodied and
characterised without being generic. For example, the work with the Ladies of the Foyer,
examined how dress affects stance, gait and voice.
Neil also suggested playing against Wildean tropes which was particularly interesting. For
example, lines that may appear to be throwaway were to be played as earnest, lines that may
seem serious to be tried with lightness, and when a character appears disgusted to play the
line with delight. This isn’t an overall rule at all. But rather a suggestion that allows
repositioning and a sense of playfulness with text. The ladies provide us with comic relief,
but also give a very clear sense of the play’s social context. Moreover, this is a world that
Dorian turns his back on. The ladies represent the claustrophobia, monotony and snobbery
of the upper classes which hold little interest for the protagonist for very long.
Within all of this work on the collective, there is the constant reminder from Neil, of the need
to find the individual reason to be there. This is a critical note that allows us not to get swept
away in a tide of posh accents and witty quips. Each actor excellently finds specificity in their
work. Alongside this, voice director, Andrea, plays clips of voice samples, rooting character
in tempo, pitch and a particular relationship with text. This work allows for the ensemble to
tap in certain registers connoting a time and place, a lifestyle, but not getting trapped in an
un-malleable mimesis. This sort of dexterity is how Neil and Andrea work together
throughout, sharing a vocabulary that unlocks the physical work that the actors do in a way
that is particular to this process. Within all the rigour, this is an over-riding sense of play and
discovery.
‘All things historic and naturalistic only interest me in so much as they tell the story’ – Neil
Bartlett.