The Picture of Dorian Gray, Haymarket Theatre, London
Well, if you thought this was a chance to see the real Siobhan Roy, or rather the real Sarah Snook, without the intermediary of a film crew (like she is in TV's Succession), then you're wrong.
No, it's much more exciting to see Snook wrestle with a high-tech theater monster in a daring, visually stunning and ultimately exhausting adaptation of Oscar Wilde's 19th century novel.
Representing 26 characters from the book – and presenting them in the style of a video installation in an art gallery – it's a show as brilliant in its conception as it is fascinating in its execution.
Playful and serious, it reinvents Wilde's Jekyll and Hyde story of a young socialite who is first freed and then tormented by a portrait that makes him look young.
Snook is cared for like a Formula One racer by a team of top stagehands and a film crew who deftly and quickly outfit her with cigarettes, wigs and facial hair.
Sarah Snook as Dorian, one of the 26 characters the actress plays during the production of 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' at the Haymarket Theatre, London
The adaptation of Oscar Wilde's story features a kaleidoscope of screens and high-tech effects
She turns to different cameras and presents different characters in different settings of London's fin-de-siècle society.
And all of this is transferred to a kaleidoscope of screens that move across the stage like giant screensavers. Inevitably, there are moments when you see Snook's famous shiv in close-up – the recoil, the twitch and the skeptical facial squeezing.
But this is a uniquely virtuoso performance that combines Wilde's love of artistry with her own gendered take on history that (fear not) is never corny or woke. Instead, it is alternately intense, mischievous, elegant and grotesque.
It begins in neutral: snake-green hooded peepers eyeing us from under a neo-Thatcherite perm.
And then she cleverly mutates into the handsome young socialite Dorian – and causes a stir with a curly Marilyn wig and clip-on whiskers, complemented by a pink velvet coat.
Funnily enough, after a two-hour workout at the gym, she looks like a blonde, corseted Elvis. A highlight is a dinner party where Snook is dressed as six high-society gargoyles – including one with a pet dog that sniffs her ankles.
But her real acting chops lie in the two main characters: Dorian's grinning mentor Henry, who delivers some of Wilde's best aphorisms (“It's not good for morals to see bad acting”); and the talented but timid artist friend Basil, who paints the dreaded portrait.
The Kip Williams production, first seen in Snook's native Australia in 2020 (starring Eryn Jean Norvill), heightens the illusions by having another avatar of Snook appear as a photobombed narrator behind her army of characters.
But music – from Donna Summer to Handel, Vivaldi and Mahler – is also woven through the show and gives it pulse, elegance and melancholy.
The lack of an intermission makes the work difficult over the two hours, and a chase through the woods at the end has the feel of a Benny Hill-style Victorian melodrama.
But this is an extraordinary and unusual work that also presents Snooks Dorian as a prototype TikTok influencer – editing her face on a cell phone for fuller lips, longer eyelashes and bionic eyebrows – and brings this cautionary tale up to date in form and Contents.