I went, with my chum Helen, to see A picture of Dorian Gray last night.
It was very good… of course, it being a classic piece of work by Oscar Wilde.

This particular revival of it featured just the one actor ( and it was a lady ) playing Dorian himself as well as all the other characters. That meant her playing about 9 parts.
There were times when up to 6 of the characters were on the stage at the same time. Clearly that wasn’t possible with just the one actor, so they used a mixture of her and video images to provide all the characters. That made it a half film/ half play, you could say.
You don’t go to the theatre to see a film though, do you? So it could have left you feeling a bit short changed in that sense.

As a production though it did work well, and was unique.

Mind you, if it catches on, what does that do to the acting profession? If one actor can play 9 parts and it’s fine to just include a load of video in a play.. then it would definitely make finding work, as an actor, very difficult.

Call me old fashioned, but give me a cast of nine real people, men playing men and women playing women… in a play… every time.

Having said that, go and see it ( if you can afford the tickets, cos it was a fair bit more expensive than it is usually for me )

It made me refresh my memory about Oscar Wilde himself. If you don’t know or had forgotten, he was a literary genius and a gay man. The latter was illegal in the 19th century, and he served gaol time in the notoriously cruel Reading Prison.

Having been released, he died ( in poverty ) at 46.

Hasn’t the World changed?