Director Seán Aydon and star Jack Crumlin told David Hennessy about a new production of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray which is touring the UK.
A new production of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is touring the UK, currently at Watford Palace Theatre.
Adapted and directed by Seán Aydon, Jack Crumlin will star as the Dorian Gray.
Seán Aydon’s recent acclaimed tours include Spitfire Girls, The School for Scandal and Frankenstein.
Jack Crumlin’s previous stage credits include Stranger Things: The First Shadow and To Kill a Mocking Bird, both in the West End.
The cast also features Mark Oxtoby as Basil Hallward, Mark Hawkins as Lord Henry Wotton.
Presented by Tilted Wig, the cast is completed by Lydia Whitehead as Sybil Vane, Ayesha Griffiths as Catherine Vane, Lydea Perkins as Lady Victoria Wotton and Max Burnett as Romeo.
In a society obsessed with youth and beauty, Dorian Gray is offered the ultimate prize: eternal perfection. But perfection comes at a price – one that must be paid in blood.
Oscar Wilde’s only novel deals with themes of vanity, corruption and the cost of unchecked desire which sees it remaining very modern despite being written in the 19th century.
Seán Aydon and Jack Crumlin took time to chat to The Irish World.
Seán Aydon has family connections in Spanish Point, Clare and Clara, Offaly.
Originally from Australia, Jack has Irish in his family history.
How are rehearsals going so far?
Seán: “Fantastic.
“It’s great when you’re working on a really great text.
“But it’s a really fantastic group of people and really exciting group of actors.”
Tell me about your own relationships with Oscar Wilde. Seán I understand you have directed this particular piece before..
Seán: “I think when you’re working on a text that has this depth and level of options for exploration, it feels like you can come back to it again and again and you’ll find so much richness in it.
“We’re finding lots of different things and lots of originality in it but whilst it’s very much about Wilde’s time, it also feels like an ancient mythic piece as well.
“I think that’s also what makes it feel quite contemporary to our time as well because it seems to exist outside of this framework.”
And what about you Jack, how familiar were you with Oscar Wilde?
“I must say before this production, my history with Oscar Wilde was pretty limited.
“I had read The Picture of Dorian Gray.
“I was stunned by it to be honest because I think I had wrongly branded it initially as a period drama and had not dived deep enough into it but actually in the process of preparing for this role, I had the opportunity to go and see a friend of mine in a musical at the Arts Festival in Galway and so on the way there, I went to Dublin and went to the Museum of Literature there and got to actually engage with Oscar Wilde and his life and his history.
“As soon as I read up a bit about the man and about his life, I was immediately just captivated by his story.
“Just such a fascinating figure.”
Although it was written well over a hundred years, would you say it’s a piece that has something to say to modern times?
Seán: “Yeah, absolutely.
“I think in every age we’re particularly obsessed with beauty and youth but there’s always been this premium on it, this idea that beauty can unlock doors and that obsession with trying to stay young which again feels very contemporary.
“You think of films like The Substance which feels like a kind of Dorian Gray story but I think what’s great about it and the reason it will live forever is we’re always going to be yearning to hold on to that youth and something we had when we were young.”
Jack: “Yeah, I think one of the themes that really catches my eye as it pertains to our life and society today is the idea of influence and who we’re being influenced by and what effect that has.
“A question that we’re considering a lot is, Do we feel a sense of sympathy for Dorian and his story? Is he responsible for his life or is it the responsibility of the people who influence him?
“I think that’s particularly relevant in this age of social media and influencers and our algorithms all being geared to convincing us to some political agenda or another.
“We’re all concerned with this idea of individuality but whose thoughts do we have?
“Are they our own thoughts?
“Are they other people’s thoughts?
“And that’s heavily what the play is concerned with, a young, fairly impressionable person at the start of the play is influenced by a few well-educated, opinionated people and we get to see someone else mould someone into something that they want them to become.
“It’s quite fascinating.”
Seán: “Yeah and also this idea of consequence: What would you do if we took away consequences? How much stuff do we not do because we don’t want to do it or because we’re scared of what might happen if we would?
“And is the only thing holding society together this idea of punishment, that there’s laws against these things or moral laws but actually we’re all living in this world where things might be very different without them?
“Do we like to think of ourselves as good people but actually we’re just scared?
“I think that’s probably what his original audience found so scary and I think still contemporary audiences find scary, that without consequence, any one of us could be Dorian.
“With extraordinary wealth and power, if you can do anything, you’ll keep pushing that boundary further and further.”
Jack: “The quote from the text that comes to mind is, ‘Conscience and cowardice are really just the same name. Conscience is just the trade name of the firm’.
“Societies for centuries are concerned with the self and who I am and, ‘Am I governed by my own impulses and what is the moral truth of things?’
“It’s very complex themes and topics and ideas but in a way, I think they’re quite core to every generation of people.
“We all just explore these things through slightly different lenses.”
Obviously it is a classic text but you have to find your own way of presenting it. What is going to be different about this production of A Picture of Dorian Gray?
Seán: “I would say it’s very stripped back to these elemental themes.
“We’re really playing with this idea of surface, of reflection, that things might not be exactly as they seem and creating ways for the audience to look at these characters that you might be able to see them as their true selves or a reflected version in many different ways, also playing with what’s true and real in the play and what’s not.
“As a psychological thriller, we’re always testing the audience on how much of this is real and how much of this is going on in the heads of these characters.
“The sins of Dorian are left deliberately ambiguous (by Wilde).
“Whatever you find, you brought yourself and I think part of that is making the audience complicit in knowing that whatever the worst thing you can imagine doing, that’s what Dorian’s doing.”
Jack: “There are elements of it that are quite stripped back so that we can focus on these big ideas that the original text is exploring.
“It’s not specifically anchored in a particular time and place so it’s not set in 1889 in London necessarily.
“There’s something quite amorphous and ambiguous about it which I think allows for a heightened engagement with what the play is saying rather than us needing to be too concerned with an accurate depiction of a period piece.
“I think that’s nice and I think that actually increases the accessibility to the text.”
Sean: “I think for us it’s always, ‘How can we be more true to the source material by being bolder in how we present it?’”
If the piece is not rooted in the Victorian era, is it still rooted in the upper class that Wilde likes to explore?
Seán: “Certainly class is a big theme in the play and I think that’s still very clear.
“Often the central characters talk about the poor and the working classes and even the middle classes with a great disdain.
“I think one of the quite clever things about it is the play or the book forces you to love Lord Henry and then as his ideas get darker and more scathing about both the poor and everyone really, you become kind of complicit in the action of that.
“For us it’s, ‘How do we create a mythical version of London that feels recognisable to us but has rules that are maybe different to our own where class is still a boundary and the Victorian ideas of morality are still very strict but at the same time we can recognise the way people interact with each other.”
Jack: “Yeah, I think class is inseparable from this story and thinking about the time that it was written where you’ve recently had the Jack the Ripper killings, this is the backdrop to the story that is being told.
“I think people associate Oscar Wilde’s stories as being perfumed and floral and heightened and things like that and it’s so interesting to me that this is based in a time where people are heavily concerned with what happens in the shadows and there was this fascination with what is the face of evil more than ever before.
“What happens if evil can come from beauty and what happens if these faceless evil deeds happening in the darkness are actually being perpetuated by the upper class or by someone that we wouldn’t normally have thought would be capable of doing something like that?
“I think class has to be a part of this story for it to be still connected to the original work.”
Of course vanity and the price of vanity are big themes of the play..
Jack: “It’s like a myth really, Dorian Gray.
“I think that vanity is something that the Greeks were concerned with.
“It was what the Victorians were concerned with and I think we are perhaps less self-aware of it as a corrupting theme now.”
Seán: “Dorian Gray feels kind of an outlier and much, much darker compared to something like The Importance of Being Earnest which is very beautiful but can feel quite fizzy and joyous whereas actually this is something that maybe he didn’t get to explore as much in his life apart from maybe on Salome.
“I think that people often read it then as just about all these things he wanted to say but actually, it’s a much more scathing rebuke on society than they were ready to handle and I think that’s why it still feels uncomfortable to people: That idea, that darkness.
“We all have a heaven and a hell in us that he’s actually touched on something quite profound and primal and scary in this and then joining that with his wonderful ability to shape language makes something very powerful.”
How does it feel for you Jack to take on this role after previous work like To Kill A Mocking Bird and Stranger Things?
Jack: “It’s a real privilege to be able to undertake this role and to be able to speak this text and I think the thing for me that really strikes me is just how modern it is.
“I’m continually struck by how modern it is.
“Give or take a little bit of the language and a few of the aphorisms and a few of the common phrases that are used in the text, it could absolutely be picked up out of its time and dropped in another part of the 20th century.
“It’s incredibly satisfying.
“I think we, as a company, all feel very honoured to be able to do the text but also supported by the text and the language and the story itself.
“There’s never a doubt in our minds that the train of the story is carrying us and supporting us.”
Of course this is an ensemble piece, how are things coming together?
Seán: “Yeah, it’s fantastic.
“One of the joys of it, I think, is that we get to see Dorian journey through the world and travel between this upper class society and this underclass.
“One of the exciting things about the ensemble we have is that every actor is very different and brings a different energy, a different rhythm so it feels that they all have their moment in the sun and to bask in Dorian’s reflected light and be shifted by it and how that darkness changes them.
“It was really key to me in adapting it that there were seven journeys that all felt worthwhile and that there was no such thing as a single-use character.
“It’s quite exciting to watch him plough through this world and just leave a trail of destruction behind in these characters.
“That triumvirate of Basil, Dorian, and Henry is so key because Wilde talked about them as being the three different sides of him: The him that he presents to the world, the him that the world sees and the him that he really is so in some ways, they’re kind of all different versions of the same thing so it feels like a really strong core to the piece that they are both wildly different but kind of all different sides of the same die.”
It will be interesting touring as you may get slightly different reactions in the different places..
Seán: “The great joy of touring is that there is no such thing as a single audience and how they receive you which I think is really exciting for a cast.
“We open at Watford Palace which is a traditional proscenium arch theatre and then our second week is at Shakespeare North Playhouse in Prescott which is an Elizabethan in the round playhouse so we immediately have to completely change everything but I think that’s so exciting because it really forces us to really be thinking, not falling into any traps or laziness but be thinking, communicating and shifting.
“And something I know the guys will find at SNP is that the feedback from the audience is so immediate because they’re so close and so it really is an interesting way of tuning your performances and learning from the audiences and challenging them and making them kind of complicit.”
Jack: “Yeah, that’s going to be such an exciting element of this tour as well is just getting to go to the different venues and adapt all of our performances for the different spaces.
“I haven’t been to Shakespeare North yet but I’ve seen pictures of it and been on the 3D virtual tour of that venue and it’s just kind of unlike anything I’ve experienced before.
“I think doing the performance completely in the round like that, I’m sure the first day of performances is going to be pretty intimidating but quite thrilling and given the fact that we are exploring vanity and reflection and things like that, for the characters not being able to escape the watching eyes of the audience by turning upstage is going to add another element to it.
“And then when we go down to Eastbourne or Theatre By The Lake or something like that and suddenly we’re in one of these beautiful old buildings performing to an audience of hundreds of people, that’s going to require a shift as well so it’s going to be quite a thrill.”
The Picture of Dorian Gray is at Watford Palace Theatre 1- 3 October, Shakespeare North Playhouse 7- 10 October, Eastbourne Theatres 13-17 October, Theatre by the Lake 20-24 October, Theatre Clwyd 27- 31 October and Yvonne Arnaud Theatre Guildford 3- 7 November.
For booking and more information, click here.
