In his annus mirabilis of 1891, Oscar Wilde wrote his first successful play (Lady Windermere’s Fan), most of Salome, a long political essay and four books, among them his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. A Faustian thriller for the age of aestheticism, the scenario of Dorian Gray – which Wilde had already published in a shortened form in a magazine – has become as familiar as an heirloom: admiring a portrait of himself, the hedonistic anti-hero is granted his wish to stay fresh-faced, while the painting, stashed in his attic, becomes grotesque in direct proportion to his debauchery and vice. The artwork decays; the body in nature achieves the perfection of artifice.
WH Smith refused to stock the novel on the grounds that it was “filthy”. Wilde’s wife Constance worried that “no one will speak to us”. But it was devoured by a generation agog at its urgings to make the most of youth, pursue pleasure and (for all Dorian’s come-uppance) disregard conventional morality. It alluded to homosexual passion, and hymned masculine beauty: Dorian is dotingly described as an “Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves”. An Oxford undergraduate called Lord Alfred Douglas read it over and over – “14 times running” – and hastened to meet its author. The rest is history – their love set in train Wilde’s downfall and death, at 46, in 1900.
Film versions sprang up in the early silent era, and the award-winning 1945 MGM version was notable for using Technicolor for the portraits alone. On stage, there have been both hits – witness Matthew Bourne’s 2008 dance piece Dorian – and misses: such as the plodding adaptation by Merlin Holland, Wilde’s only grandson, at Trafalgar Studios in 2015.
This week sees a new version, unveiled online on the anniversary of theatre’s closure by Covid, to raise funds for the stricken regional sector. It’s a theatre-film hybrid, by the team behind last year’s ingenious digital spin on Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! Stephen Fry is back, joined by Joanna Lumley and Russell Tovey; rising star Alfred Enoch (the lead in Carve Up!) returns too. But all eyes will be on Fionn Whitehead as Dorian.
The south-west Londoner (his first name pronounced “Finn”) was just 19 when, in 2017, after no drama training, a sole TV credit (Him) and a fringe production (Natives, Southwark Playhouse), he was cast in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. We followed that military debacle in part through his character’s against-the-odds survival on the beach, his boyish vulnerability battle-hardening in a real-time rite of passage.
Since then, Whitehead’s good looks and gift for subtly legible emotion have seen him shine in the film of Ian McEwan’s The Children Act, playing a gravely ill teenager whose passionate intensity about his Jehovah’s Witness faith beguiles Emma Thompson’s emotionally at sea High Court judge. Adding to his reputation was his hypnotic turn in the interactive 2018 Black Mirror episode Bandersnatch, as a damaged 1980s geek whose quest to code a video adventure-game was subject to the viewer’s real-time decisions.
Now with Dorian – filmed in just a few days last month at the Barn, Cirencester – comes a fairly heady endorsement of his looks. Over Zoom, Whitehead, looking more boy-next-door than devilish dandy thanks to his glasses, T-shirt and tousled hair, lets out a gentle laugh.
“I don’t know… I’ve got the most crooked teeth you’ve ever seen in your life, and moles. It’s very flattering, though.” He inclines his head in thought.
“In the original, Dorian is a beautiful man but the emphasis in this version is on his youth. Is it his beauty that attracts everyone or the fact that people want to be his age again?”
This may be the only adaptation in which being a pretty face really is just the half of it. Writer Henry Filloux-Bennett has brought Wilde’s story into the modern-day realm of tirelessly maintained social media profiles. “I was inspired by the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, which looks at the dark side of social media,” he explains. “It suggested that for the first time in history, our primary connections are online as opposed to in real-life. That seemed incredibly dangerous.
“The deal Dorian now makes is: ‘I don’t mind what you do with my physical body, but keep my online presence perfect’. Instead of a portrait, he gets given a filter that makes him into an even more beautified version of himself. We’ve set it in lockdown, so when he goes out wearing a face-mask, it starts by being a civic responsibility and then becomes a means of hiding the corruption afflicting his body.”
Filloux-Bennett maintains that it’s “a horrible world that people are now living in”. Whitehead agrees: “What I loved about the script is the way it highlights the falseness of social media and what it can do to someone, the way they’re projecting an image of their life as they want others to see it.”
He has quit social media entirely. “As I gained more recognition it was something I grew more wary of. I can see it has the potential to do a lot of good – it can engage people in a conversation about social issues,” he says, but “it plays on people’s need for validation and attention. I don’t want to let it control my life. I want to fight and move away from that as much as possible.” For him, the less self-aware an actor is, the better. “You need to be in the moment. The minute you think about how you look, it’s hard to give an honest performance.”
Can the tide be turned? “I think it’s entirely possible and fine not to do social media,” says Whitehead. “This is something that literally occurred in the last 12 years. People were living before it, they will live after it. It’s one of those things: the longer you’re plugged in, the bigger it becomes in your head. It is another form of addiction.”
He’s equally adamant about his right not to talk about his social life or divulge his sexuality. “If you want to be vocal about your sexuality, great. If it’s something that makes you feel empowered, fantastic. Equally, if it’s something you want to be private about, that’s OK too. People’s private lives should be their own. The idea that other people know best about your choices seems bizarre. It feeds on that thing you can get from social media – not feeling you have the power to make decisions for yourself nor trust your own will.”
It’s a paradox that the young actor entrusted with incarnating Dorian Gray for the 21st century should privilege the inner life over external trappings, but Wilde didn’t just anticipate our age of surface; he anticipated its darkness, too.
As Filloux-Bennett says: “Wilde was prescient, he was speaking across the generations. He advocated, even if only in provocation, aesthetics over ethics – and that’s the quintessence of social media culture and youth culture. Dorian Gray’s mental health struggles don’t come from anything other than him wanting to present himself in a different way and that feels like something we’re all battling with right now. I’d say there has never been a better time for us to talk about how we show ourselves to the world.”
The Picture of Dorian Gray streams from March 16; pictureofdoriangray.com
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbHLnp6rmaCde6S7ja6iaJ6Zobq0e49om66mm56%2FrHnSrZirZZaevK%2B6jLCfoqyVnbKisIyup52ZpJ67qHnOrJqaql2stq2wxGagp6uklrSzrcxo