I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be critici&d from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of morality are absolutely distinct and separate; and it is to the confusion between the two that we owe the appearance of Mrs Grundy, that amusing old lady who represents the only original form of humour that the middle classes of this country have been able to produce.

Oscar Wilde

From a letter to the Editor of the St. James’s Gaztte:
Dorian Gray, with all its faults, is a wonderful book.

W B Yeats

INTRODUCTION

The torn-down nest:
The Matter of Dorian Gray and the Staging of It

Why Dorian Gray? And, if so, how? One can certainly hear the questions and even some of the answers at the outset. I shall only attempt here a few answers to the questions and problems raised by dramatizing this work for the stage. First of all, I have called it simply but deliberately ‘A Moral Entertainment’ because that is what it is. The original is a superb entertainment; notwithstanding all the things that one knows about it and have been said so many times. It is, of course, melodramatic and steeped in the personal but painful yillery-yallery of Wilde himself. One is constantly reminded of some of the flabbiest fat-boys’ vainglory of the early fairy stories. Like them, it is also overlarded, full of false patches and almost sublime vulgarity, and overweaning in its grasping after an exquisitely splendid absurdity.

I remember reading it as a boy of about eleven and it went a long way towards dispelling the fatty image of those fairy stories which I had read earlier and which offended a small ulcerous reticence within me even then. I had always admired overbold gestures in the service of style in writing and in everything else and I have continued to do so. But the fairy stories were too much for my schoolboy stomach. The voice was plummy and florid, decadent but unexciting, sybaritic but ultimately tasteless and unselective. Naturally, my reaction was not as lucid as this but I think I was already aware that there are figures in art who dominate an age by the power of their creative personality rather than by the fact of what they actually create. It is obvious, but it is always the obvious that has to be restated, that Wilde the man is a much more powerful and significant creation than anything he actually wrote.

It is a proposition he would almost certainly have approved himself. For, while second- or third-rate artists often put their best work into their lives and are more interesting as people, they seldom reach a pitch of perfection which stamps itself permanently on the English consciousness as did Oscar Wilde. He was his own best creation. Good writers are mostly dull dogs. Other writers have made ‘legends’ part of their lives – one thinks in our own times of the Dylan Thomases, the Scott Fitzgeralds, the Brendan Behans, the Hemingways and so on. Certainly, their influence on literature itself may have been more significant and more lasting but it seems to me that Wilde opened up a free style to a general public who never even saw or heard any of his work. And in a manner itself nearer to the effect on the whole area of the Western sensibility in which the twentieth century has been inhabited – as did Marx or Freud. This may seem sweeping and no doubt it is. However, almost everything there is to be said about Wilde seems to have been said by somebody (including himself, naturally) and I dare say this is one of them. It is pursuable but not enough I suspect to do so at any length. It is a semi-proposition and one may take it or leave it.

The fact remains that The Picture of Dorian Gray is not only a remarkable achievement of its time, given all its faults, but the germinal story is an inspired one like, say, that of Jekyll and Hyde. The story itself is what sold out the issues of Lippincott’s and intrigued its Victorian readers. It is a variation on the Mephistophelian bargain with the Devil. But in art ideas are two a penny, as I have repeatedly told Producers, pregnant with oudines, and Writers, heavy with plot, many times.

It is the carrying through of the exercise, the form that an idea takes, which makes it take off rather than languish over a lunch-table, a bar, or the front office. Execution is all, which, as the programmers of Television Companies never seem to realize, is a very different thing from ‘packaging’.

One of the things that has struck me about the original book is its feeling of wilful courage and despair, the two qualities only too clearly embodied in the spirit of Wilde himself. It is an infuriating work, often misleading, sometimes deadly serious when it should be self-mocking, and so on. For example, there was a time, some years ago when the ethic of effortless physical beauty might have seemed no more than a camp, tiresomely self-abusing piece of attitudinizing.

But today? What are the things most valued, sought after? Beauty, yes; youth, most certainly. Youth has become, like death, almost a taboo subject. Everyone is not merely afraid of losing it but of even admitting that such a possibility exists. Again, youth is all important, all reaching, all powerful. It is obligatory to be trim, slim, careless. The lines of age on Dorian Gray’s portrait are a very modern likeness in all this. Such a bargain with the Devil, which to Victorians seemed bizarre as well as wicked, in that they thought it thwarted nature or attempted to deny the Natural Order, is incipient in our world devoted to energizing, activating, promoting, jetting away. What prolongs active life? Why, a shot of Dorian Grays! Dorian Grays to you, man. Sin may not be the scene any longer. But evil is different. You can at least identify it negatively as that thing you don’t like, is not to your tastes, conflicts with your interests. Of wrath, envy, lust, greed, avarice, pride or sloth, only pride might get a flicker of recognition on the charts. Pride has no place in a property-owning democracy any more than on a mind-blown cloud or among the freedom killers of unknowing.

So then, we enter into a world which is without a sense of sin but acutely aware of something vague but daily threatening which might even still be called evil; like the present interest in occult sciences and astrology, for instance, it is a world in which the truth of opposites is clear, if not always understood; where duality is usefully all. The only principle is that of uncertainty. In such a world, the Charles Mansons with their manoeuvrings, killings, bombings, hi-jackings and growing sophistication of horrors make the mild eccentricities of an Aleister Crowley seem almost spinsterish in their innocence. So far has the liberal ethos had to adjust itself to the idea of contending with, if not recognizing, such sources of evil. As I write this, one of the lame jokes around is that of the new theatrical hazard of an audience, or members of it, at least, being in danger of getting venereal disease from facial or bodily contact with actors.

The same kind of thing goes for the homosexual mobbery of ‘gay’ movements, with their mags and ads. Indeed the very separatism of sexuality itself has been derided as oppressive and clubbed over its limp head by the remains of Adam’s Rib. Years ago, Simone de Beauvoir coined what I thought was a memorable phrase about the menstrual cycle, which she described as the monthly building up of a nest being torn down. The fragments of that nest are scattered everywhere.

All this may seem a long way from what most people will regard as apiece of Yellow Book melodrama. Or, indeed, whether such an enterprise as this dramatization is desirable or has any point at all. Presumably, by this time, someone will have decided one way or the other.

I distrust the method of open analogy as much as anyone but it is not difficult to find paraphrase in the world of the Pall Mall Gazette, Wilde, W. H. Stead, Shaw, Dilke, the Oxford Movement, the Pre-Raphaelites and Grosvenor Gallery; of self-help and opium; of laudanum and Fleet Street, of leisurely walks in gardens and dallyings in conservatories with freakouts and happenings.

It is my own belief that the part of Dorian Gray should preferably be played by a woman. As many people know, this was one of the parts cherished by Garbo. Despite, rather than because of this, this very ambiguity would help enormously to defuse the camp or period of the acting style and enable it to be played as straightforwardly, if ironically, as possible. The parallels with the historical consciousness of the last 100 years are, in fact, endless.

Having said as much, I would like to make it clear that the play should be in no way overemphatic in any of these directions. They are merely guidelines.

The set, for example, should be an all-purpose hole-in-the-ground world, reflecting only some of the aspects outside it. It is the world of Dorian Gray, clearly described and envisaged by Wilde himself and also almost pathetic in its dingy vision of the hemp trail that now leaves from the Far East and into Europe and beyond. Not a pretty sight, then or now.

John Osborne
September 1972

Characters

BASIL HALLWARD

LORD HENRY WOTTON

DORIAN GRAY

LORD FERMOR

LADY AGATHA

DUCHESS OF HARLEY

SIRTHOMAS BURDON

MRERSKINE

SIBYL VANE

DUCHESS OF MONMOUTH

MRS VANE
Sibyl‘s mother

JAMES VANE
Sibyl‘s brother

VICTOR
Dorian‘s French valet

MR HUBBARD
a frame-maker

FRANCIS
Dorian‘s valet later

ALAN CAMPBELL

FIGURES OUT OFTHE NIGHT

TWO POLICEMEN

The Picture of Dorian Gray was first performed at the Greenwich Theatre, London in February 1975 with the following cast:

It was performed as BBC1 play of the month, 19th September 1976 with the following cast:

ACT ONE

Scene 1

Basil Hallward’s Studio

It is the world of DORIAN GRAY.

The set should be flexible to contain this Studio, DORIAN GRAY’s house, and, in particular, his attic room which could be ascended by a few steps perhaps. A conservatory or small garden contained somewhere and the rest should most probably be pure dressing, both of the type described in somewhat gloating details by Wilde and prefiguring what is to come years later. In short, jumped-up mysticism, with what Wilde calls acutely Its marvellous power of making common things strange to us’.

‘He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their true relations wondering what there was in frankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one’s passions, and in violets that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and in champak that stained the imagination’, and so on, and so on. In other words, tributes to all kinds of arts and decadence. Whether it be music, in the shape of yellow-shawled Tunisians plucking at the strained strings of monstrous lutes, or Negroes beating upon copper drums or slim turbaned Indians playing through pipes of brass at great hooded snakes of the period. So, a great deal of late Victorian camp objets as well as pictures and pieces of furniture of impeccable respectability along with the rest of it.

Jewellery was a particular passion of DORIAN’s, of course, and there should be room for plenty of examples of this as well as embroideries of every description, whether Sicilian brocades, stiff Spanish velvet, Georgian work with gilt coins or gold-toned Japanese with plumaged birds and, inevitably, purple and gold draped everywhere – like prose of the same styk.

The picture needs little embroidery. In a corner, on a divan of Persian type, sits LORD HENRY WOTTON. He is, as ever, smoking innumerable cigarettes. In another part of the room, stands BASIL HALLWARD, painting in front of an upright easel. LORD HENRY is the first to speak.

LORD HENRY: There is no question, Basil – the best thing you’ve ever done. You will have to send it to the Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse. The Grosvenor is really the only place.

BASIL: I don’t think I shall send it anywhere, come to think of it. No: I won’t send it anywhere.

LORD HENRY: My dear fellow, why? What an odd lot you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. Then, as soon as you get one, you seem to want to throw it away.

BASIL: I knew you would laugh at me, but it’s simply that I can’t exhibit it. I’ve put too much of myself into it.