Oscar Wilde’s DORIAN GRAY
By Mike Parker
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In the preface to his only novel, 19th Century English playwright, Oscar Wilde commented, All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their own peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
That novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is undoubtedly a work of art, filled with surface and symbol. It is also a work of exquisite beauty. Few writers of any era can match Wilde for his marvelous manipulation of the English language. And yet, there is something more. Something almost…autobiographical about this curious retelling of the Faust myth.
An adherent to the pseudo-religion of aestheticism, a philosophy that worships beauty above all things, Wilde used The Picture of Dorian Gray to explore the breadth and depth of that peculiar faith. In the end, Oscar Wilde, along with his creation, Dorian Gray, discovers that beauty is a gift, but only for a season. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish, Lord Henry asserts. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets. King Solomon, perhaps, said it better, Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.
Mike Parker’s stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s DORIAN GRAY takes some literary license, the first and most striking of which is the recasting the genders of several pivotal characters, most notably that of Dorian Gray.
“In our society it is not much of a challenge to show a man traveling down the road to perdition,” Parker asserts. “Indeed, it is almost assumed that a man will become debauched and derelict. There is something more disturbing about a young woman who chooses to walk that path.”
For those who would hazard to look beneath the surface to read the symbol of Oscar Wilde’s DORIAN GRAY – be careful. You might find in it the autobiography of your own soul.