Dorian Gray Middle School Play
A buzz of excitement echoed around the James Caird as we assembled in the North Cloister, on a golden evening, to watch the third and final promenade performance of Dorian Gray , adapted and directed by Anna Simpson. Mrs Norton-Smith increased the anticipation by announcing our itinerary, which was to include a rare visit to the cellars below the Lower Hall. Drinks were sloshed hastily into plastic cups, as a ‘very special guest’ (Jack Theophanous) glided into view, introduced himself as ‘Mr Wilde’, imperiously demanded that we switch off those ‘baffling devices’, our mobiles, and added that, while ‘all art is useless’, he should nonetheless be delighted were we to join him for a performance of perhaps his most famous novel, to be presented in theatrical form, in a variety of venues around the school.
Drifting up the stairs into the wooden-panelled intimacy of the Masters’ Library, we there encountered Harry Warren, a languid Lord Henry Wotton, lounging in a green leather armchair. Our focus shifted to the painter standing behind his easel – the flamboyantly bescarfed Basil Hallward (Alex Holley), and to a chorus of gold-brocaded, back- combed Gothic commentators, a gasp running like a ripple through their bodies, the name ‘Dorian Gray’ whispered urgently before his dramatic entrance on the balcony.‘The only way to resist temptation… is to yield to it’, is Wotton’s dubious advice to the artist’s model, the danger and glamour of his counsel aptly conveyed via the chorus’s snake-like suspirations. ‘Youth is the only thing worth having,’ they murmur, and Gray (played with aplomb by Cameron Forbes), listens, half-appalled, half-entranced.
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