Sound/Effects

Ominous sound and music (p1)

A vague sound of birdsong (p1)

Wild clapping and cheering from the audience (p22)

The sound of a carriage with Dorian Gray driving past (p33)

The sound of a ship’s horn in the distance (p34)

There is the sound of a band tuning up (p39)

The music starts up with an overture….the music starts to go wrong. It slows down and distorts as if a gramophone is dying (p40)

Sound of slow hand-clapping, boos and hisses (p41)

Some jaunty music strikes up (p41)

Clock chimes and strikes one o’clock in the afternoon (p45)

Sound of urgent banging on the front door (p46)

Picture Effect – Lights and Sound. Music (p49)

Music swells (p49)

Rings the bell (p54)

Steady ticking of a clock and then several clocks as the scene goes on (p58)

The stage flls with smoke (p59)

Alarms of a thousand clocks are heard in unison (p61)

Fog (p62)

Picture Effect – Lights and Sound. Music (p65)

Gun fres (p78)

A cry is heard (p78)

We hear sound effects of whistles in the background and men running to attend the body (p78)

Music (p81)

Picture Effect – Lights and Sound. Music (p88)

Huge Picture Effect – Lights and Sound. Music (p88)

A terrible cry is heard (p88)

Sound of birds (p88)

Music (p89)

Copyright © 2016 by Merlin Holland and John O’Connor

All Rights Reserved

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY is fully protected under the copyright laws of the British Commonwealth, including Canada, the United States of America, and all other countries of the Copyright Union. All rights, including professional and amateur stage productions, recitation, lecturing, public reading, motion picture, radio broadcasting, television and the rights of translation into foreign languages are strictly reserved.

ISBN 978-0-573-11183-9

www.samuelfrench-london.co.uk

www.samuelfrench.com

CAUTION: Professional and amateur producers are hereby warned that THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY is subject to a licensing fee. Publication of this play does not imply availability for performance. Both amateurs and professionals considering a production are strongly advised to apply to the appropriate agent before starting rehearsals, advertising, or booking a theatre. A licensing fee must be paid whether the title is presented for charity or gain and whether or not admission is charged.

The professional rights in this play are controlled by Samuel French Ltd, 52 Fitzroy Street, London W1T 5JR.

No one shall make any changes in this title for the purpose of production. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, now known or yet to be invented, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, videotaping, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. No one shall upload this title, or part of this title, to any social media websites.

The right of Merlin Holland and John O’Connor to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

AUTHORS’ NOTE

Oscar Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray in the winter of 1889/90. By that time he was married with two children; he was the author of a volume of somewhat derivative poems, a failed Russian political drama and a collection of stories for children; and he was making a precarious living from book reviewing and writing the odd short story and essay for magazines. He had also been the editor of a woman’s journal, but had recently given it up, regularity of habit not being one of his strong points. In short he was teetering dangerously on the edge of respectability. Earlier in the year he had published a controversial dialogue called ‘The Decay of Lying’ in which he made a plea for more imagination in literature and less of the currently fashionable realism. In essence it was a broadside fired against what Lady Bracknell would later refer to as the ‘three-volume novel of more than usually revolting sentimentality’, and a chance commission that autumn from an American magazine allowed him to put into practice what he had been preaching.

Dorian Gray was published on 20 June 1890 simultaneously in London and Philadelphia in the July number of Lippincott’s Magazine. It immediately unleashed a storm of protest from British critics, and even for Oscar, who had been conducting his own public relations campaign off and on since leaving Oxford, the effect must have been surprising. It was described variously as ‘a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction’ and written ‘for outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys’, which is as close as the critics could allow themselves to an outright accusation of the story’s homosexual overtones. The oblique reference was to a police raid the year before on a notorious male brothel in Cleveland Street involving young employees of the General Post Office with members of the aristocracy, and the subsequent Establishment cover-up. As a consequence of the reviews, WH Smith (ever the self-appointed guardian of British morals) refused to stock Lippincott’s for July. ‘To get into the best society, nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people,’ Lord Illingworth remarks in A Woman of No Importance. Unfortunately, in taking his own advice, Oscar cannot have foreseen the degree to which that society would turn against him five years later.

Once the succès de scandale had died down, Wilde set about expanding the story to have it published in book-form, which it was the following year. As well as adding new material, rather uncharacteristically, he toned down some of the more overtly homoerotic passages but always denied publicly that any adverse criticism affected his decision. In adapting Wilde’s only novel for the stage, we have reintroduced a few of those suppressions from the magazine as well as others from the original manuscript, in order to reflect Oscar’s original intentions. These passages, significant as they are, will be largely unknown to the general public, who read the novel today as published in its book-length version. One of the most significant, for example, occurs in Scene 11 when Basil Hallward confesses his love for Dorian Gray in the following terms: ‘It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man should ever give to a friend. Somehow, I have never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. From the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I quite admit that I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly.’

Unfortunately the fall-out from Dorian Gray was to haunt its author. In 1895, when Oscar Wilde sued the Marquess of Queensberry for calling him a sodomite, the Marquess’s lawyers filed a plea of justification in which they portrayed the story as an ‘immoral and obscene work’ describing ‘sodomitical and unnatural habits tastes and practices…and calculated to subvert morality and to encourage unnatural vice.’ With that they hoped to convince the jury of Wilde’s guilt by association with his work. Although, in the event, he was able to defend himself and his art skilfully enough, the damage was done and the matter was raised again by the Crown Prosecutor when Wilde was tried subsequently for homosexual offences. One cannot help wondering what the Crown would have made of a private letter written the year before, in which he makes the revealing statement: ‘Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry is what the world thinks me: Dorian is what I would like to be – in other ages, perhaps.’

Despite assuring Oscar Wilde’s posthumous reputation throughout the world, it is a sobering thought that The Picture of Dorian Gray, once described by Arthur Ransome as ‘the first French novel to be written in English’, and which now figures on the A-level English curriculum, should have contributed, even marginally, to putting Oscar Wilde behind bars 120 years ago.

Merlin Holland and John O’Connor

January 2016

Notes on staging

Picture Effect

The big challenge in presenting The Picture of Dorian Gray on stage is how to create the magical portrait as it grows older and more corrupted. In the original production, we had an empty, free-standing, life-sized picture frame that represented the portrait. At the top of the play, we see Dorian standing in the frame, looking young and beautiful and this image is repeated at the end. When Basil is painting, his brushes are, in fact, caressing the empty space within the frame. It means the audience can see him paint and their view is not compromised by having a large, obstructive canvas on stage. After the death of Sibyl Vane, the picture appears at Dorian’s house covered with a cloth. We used a thin, dark material that shimmered slightly on stage and added a sinister quality to the picture. When Dorian first looks at it again, we had the actor lifting up the cloth from the side so that he could see the picture but the audience couldn’t. This was accompanied by sharp lighting and a menacing sound effect that conveyed to the audience a sense of the picture’s evil power. What the audience doesn’t see is often more horrific than anything you can show them as their collective imagination runs riot.

At the end of scene 14 (’Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril’) we see Dorian in the picture again. This vision of him should be shocking after all the years of corruption. This can be achieved by gothic lighting from below which casts grotesque shadows on the face, lurid colour and malevolent sound effects. The actor can also adjust his body shape and facial expression to add a greater sense of decay. When Dorian stabs the picture at the end of the play, all of the lighting, sound and physical elements should come together climactically before the picture is restored to its original beauty.

Of course, this is only one way of achieving the horror of the original story and you may want to experiment with other methods such as video projection which may be equally effective.

The play was first presented at the Queen’s Hall Arts Centre, Hexham on 8 April 2015 before touring to 45 venues all over the UK and ending at St James Theatre, London on Saturday 20 June – 125 years to the day that The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in Lippincott’s Magazine. The cast was Guy Warren-Thomas, Rupert Mason, Gwynfor Jones and Helen Keeley.

The production then transferred to Trafalgar Studios in London, opening on Monday 18 January 2016. The cast and characters were as follows:

DORIAN GRAY Guy Warren-Thomas

BASIL HALLWARD Rupert Mason

DUCHESS OF HARLEY

MR ISAACS

JAMES VANE

MR HUBBARD

SERVANT 1

GAMEKEEPER

LORD HENRY WOTTON John Gorick

MRS VANE

VICTOR

ALAN CAMPBELL

ADRIAN SINGLETON

LADY AGATHA Helen Keeley

SYBIL VANE

LADY HENRY

MRS LEAF

SERVANT 2

OPIUM SELLER

DUCHESS OF MONMOUTH

HETTY MERTON

PRODUCER John O’Connor

DIRECTOR Peter Craze

DESIGNER Dora Schweitzer

LIGHTING DESIGNER Duncan Hands

SOUND DESIGNER Matthew Eaton

This play can be performed by any number of actors between 4 and 21. Given the logistical complications of co-ordinating exits, entrances and costume changes for the smallest cast, the above distribution of parts was found to be the best workable solution.