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Dorian by Andrew McMillan Proper Job Theatre at Hexham Queen’s Hall

Sometimes one feels for theatre companies with the obvious commitment of Proper Job. When their presentation of Andrew McMillan’s play took place in Hexham, the theatre was surrounded by one of the noisiest fairs I have ever heard and seen, the showpiece of Hexham’s ‘Spook Night’ of 26^th October. The actors necessarily struggled against these noises off, which seemed to penetrate the hall from a door level to the stage. This play is a play of many tones and domains – of visual effect and sound, of intellectual and emotional force – and not least of the body and the ways the body is framed, screened and occluded from our understanding. Many of those tones can only survive in internal reconstructions of those effects in individual minds when in the presence of alien screams from the fairground. So though it was possible to know that this was a great scripted text greatly enacted, it had to be without feeling that as part of the play’s social effect in the communion-like conditions of theatre. Audience size was necessarily cut by this co-occurring event as was some of its emotional and intellectual effect, and their interactions, blocked for the audience.

The play takes a number of ideas: the role of visualised body image or body-part image as a substitution for somatic consciousness in the here and now, the massive effect of social media in feeding a taste for manipulated selves (in ‘images’ that are both visual and textually constructed (in Twitter for instance)) and the vulnerability of those manipulated ‘images’ whether the original ‘images’ were made of edited pictures or text. But at the heart of the play is the role of image as a mediation of father-son relationships and how these are realised or, with consequent damage to relationships, abstracted from the body and its touch. Body becomes an image rather than a felt medium of relationship in these terribly moving interactions.

The play works through visual imagery – sculpted body parts placed in concerted fragmentation (in the form of ‘sculpting’ in psychological family therapy), window frames and pane (pain) frames, mirrors – distorting or otherwise, to show that even non-distorting mirrors distort when they reduce physical or sense dimensions of the body. It works through projection onto screens to place us in moments where psychological introjection and projection might both be present. Manipulations done by Photoshop are not the only manipulations here.

Even the Wilde text is strangely distorted. Dorian originates as an older man trying to escape that point of view by diminution of his age and paradoxically achieving ‘bigness’ of image by effects of shaping facilitated by exercise or drugs. But Dorian is also doubled by his son, Sam, a boy whose wasting bulimia reverses Dorian’s growth, Henry Wootton becomes Henry the Hench – a gym owner and personal trainer, Basil Hailward a digital photographer and a woman. These queerings of the text somewhat heighten the plays intellectual contribution to urgent debates but they also force forward the emotional heart of the play in the representation, sometimes oblique, of father-son relationships, as a crucible of masculine identity.

Despite ‘Spook Night noise, I still wanted to cry in the scene when Sam and Dad, Dorian, reflect each other back to back through a screen: the bodily gestures and words of each other in an open exchange of introjected and projected images of pain, gestures aimed to survival and self-extinction through body-image intervention (by eating disorder, drugs or other kind of repetitive obsession – such as those that cause vulnerability too in social media).

This is a great play by a great poet and thinker about embodied gender and person. Of course it is a young poet’s work. But what will we see as years pass – a question any Dorian Gray text will always ask?

Forgive the brief swift response, @AndrewPoetry, should you ever read this, which I don’t expect – on some of these themes I cannot talk, especially on how the feelings of fat boy kids enter adulthood.