Inspired by

The Picture of Dorian Gray

BASED ON THE LIFE AND TRIALS

The centennial of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trial and exile inspired a rash of works about the brilliant man of letters. Director Brian Gilbert’s film Wilde (1997) features Stephen Fry as Wilde and provides a rich portrait of the author’s life; it is based on Richard Ellmann’s 1988 biography (see “For Further Reading”).

Perhaps the most appropriate tribute to Wilde was the proliferation of plays dedicated to his memory. Thomas Kilroy’s The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde (1997) deals with Wilde’s often unnoticed wife and the mother of his two children. The Judas Kiss (1998), by David Hare, develops the twin themes of love and betrayal as it focuses on Wilde and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas. In Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997), playwright Moisés Kaufman weaves together court transcripts and Wilde’s own writing and quotations. Kaufman’s widely successful play even makes a character of Queen Victoria, who approved of the Gross Indecency laws that remained in effect until 1967.

FILM ADAPTATIONS OF THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

With its visual drama, The Picture of Dorian Gray lends itself readily to cinema. MGM’s lavish, big-budget production appeared in 1945, adapted and directed by Albert Lewin. The transmutation of Dorian Gray, played by Hurd Hatfield, into an emotionless fiend is seamless, and the film garnered three Oscar nominations (including one for Angela Lansbury, who plays Dorian’s victim Sibyl Vane) and earned the award for black-and-white cinematography. What audiences are most likely to remember, though, is the painting of Dorian, by Ivan Albright, glowing in Technicolor—the only element of the film that was shot in color. Albright’s hideously realized Picture of Dorian Gray (1943-1944) hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago.

OPERA

American composer Lowell Liebermann premiered The Picture of Dorian Gray at the Opera de Monte Carlo on May 8, 1996. Dialogues between Dorian and his portrait are presented as duets between a tenor and the orchestra; as the opera progresses, the music gradually disintegrates as the dramatic arc leads to Dorian’s absolute corruption. Liebermann has also composed classical pieces based on poems by Stephen Crane, William Butler Yeats, Walt Whitman, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

SEQUELS

In 1997 British poet and literary biographer Jeremy Reed published a sequel to Wilde’s novel that is vaguely pornographic and hallucinatory in tone; it is titled simply Dorian. At Reed’s hand, Wilde’s cruel hero survives the destruction of his portrait to become an opium addict and a master of the occult arts. Dorian has an affair with Lord Henry Wotton and meets Oscar Wilde upon his release from prison in 1897. (Reed also edited The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Lippincott Edition, which restores many of the references to homosexuality that Wilde was forced to write out of the book, and which features illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley.)

In a modern adaptation of Wilde’s novel, Will Self, with Dorian: An Imitation (2003), brings Dorian Gray to June 1981, the summer of the royal wedding of Charles and Diana. Basil Hallward is now a video installation artist in whose piece “Cathode Narcissus” a naked and perfect Dorian appears on a series of television monitors. The video Dorian becomes aged and diseased, and many of his friends contract AIDS and HIV-related illnesses. Dorian’s criminality transmutes into murder as he knowingly infects other men with the disease he carries without symptom.