Oscar Wilde on the Frankfurt Theater | EUROtoday

The painter Basil really would not need to point out the title of his new pal, particularly to not the decidedly amoral Lord Henry. Then he lets it slip: “Of course I’m not like Dorian Gray,” he says. First of all, this was because of the look – Henry had requested for the mannequin of the newest image that he had seen within the painter’s studio and reacted incredulously to his assertion that there was “too much of me” within the image.

But if it isn’t the looks that connects Basil with what Henry calls the “young Adonis,” then what do the 2 – the painter and the image – have in widespread? And what function does Henry, the observer, play on this?

The query of what connects and separates the three characters runs by way of the stage model of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” – printed in 1890 as a narrative and considerably expanded as a novel in 1891 – which the director Ran Chai Bar-zvi created along with Lukas Schmelmer and has now dropped at the naked stage within the Kammerspiele at Schauspiel Frankfurt. At the start, the roles are clearly distributed: Basil, performed by Miguel Klein Medina, is about his artwork and his mannequin that he’s clearly in love. Stefan Graf’s cynical Lord Henry, who additionally feels drawn to the attractive Dorian, utters one quip after one other and works onerous to confront the younger man’s charming naivety with actuality, which finally ends in making him certainly one of his equals.

And Dorian? In the brief time of lower than ninety minutes by which the novel is squeezed in, the actor Mitja Over has to undergo the transformation from an harmless lamb to a hardened dandy and assassin, from a celebrated social debutante to a shunned libertine. The approach there leads by way of a fantastically choreographed dance scene for 3 to the music of “Sweet Dreams are made of this”, the variation to the shrill clothes type of the 2 older males, who usually put him in a decent spot on the already slender stage, which is made even narrower by a revolving wall within the center, and at last by way of the expertise of oblique guilt within the loss of life of one other particular person, mixed with the necessity to one way or the other take care of it.

The approach out is thought: Dorian delegates the traces of his wild life, the excesses, the guilt, to the image painted by Basil, which he closes to the world. So you may’t inform something about him, not even the twenty years that move within the novel’s plot. The actual explosive factor on this idea, which each the novel and the intelligent stage model take note of, is the query of whether or not what one can not see continues to be there, i.e. whether or not the kid’s perception within the energy of squinting really has an impact within the case of Dorian, who’s on the edge of maturity.

The scene that introduces this improvement and brings it to the purpose is likely one of the strongest of the night. Dorian has taken Basil and Henry to a shabby East End theater the place the woman he has fallen in love with and desires to marry is on stage. Now they stare on the stage within the play, i.e. within the course of the Frankfurt viewers, who in flip solely catch a glimpse of how Dorian’s girlfriend is taking part in within the faces of the three. This is clearly catastrophic, as is shortly obvious within the initially excited, then bravely struggling for enthusiasm and at last resigned expressions of the three. Dorian resents his fiancée’s failure and lets her really feel it. When he receives the information of her suicide the following day, he tries to cry. And cannot.

Dorian says at one level that he’s jealous of his portray, and once more we because the viewers don’t see it as a result of the actors’ gaze, directed on the portray, goes from the stage to us. Everything stays in limbo, particularly the connection between mannequin and picture, which an epilogue by Marcus Peter Tesch makes an attempt to shed additional gentle on.

The precise play involves an finish with out citing the novel’s finale with Dorian’s transformation and his loss of life. Then the three actors stand on the fringe of the stage, with the closed purple curtain behind them, they’ve put down their roles and move the balls to one another. They speak about Dorian and his picture, about how the picture bodily penetrates its mannequin and Dorian lovingly describes the opposite’s aged physique, particularly within the lack of its youthfulness: “I love the sad rest of you.”

At the tip, Dorian stands in entrance of the mirror, immersed in calm self-love, appears to be like on the wrinkles on the corners of his mouth and makes peace. With this twist, which is unmistakably as a result of our narcissistic current, the play deviates considerably from its authentic by taking the narcissism described within the novel to the intense. The incontrovertible fact that there isn’t a longer any speak of guilt is scarier than anything.