November 2019 saw the end of our final tour of Dorian. The process had begun two years previously with poet Andrew McMillan, recent winner of the Polari Prize for Poetry, when we began an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Andrew’s poetry and personal interest in this area fed into the contemporary retelling of this classic tale with surprising relevance to today’s society. The piece asked questions about our use of social media, in particular manipulation techniques, editing our own image to create better versions of ourselves, the inherent problematic narrative in this idea and the consequences of existing within this perfect frame.

Starting with a poet as playwright, we continued this theme of crossing artistic boundaries within the creative team. The cast was made up of musicians, opera singers, physicists and actors, our designer originates her artistic practice in sculpture, and the direction has its Russian roots in Meyerhold’s biomechanics. The sum of these various creative influences bore out into: