Eryn Jean Norvill was ready for her close-up, pursued not by a bear but by a phalanx of film cameras in STC Artistic Director Kip Williams’ five-star reimagining of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s bonfire of vanity horror novel-turned-stage play. So successful was this fusion of art forms that Williams deployed the tactic again with last year’s Ewen Leslie and Matthew Backer-led Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Mucking around with the idea of subtitles, and then with music video-like sequences, including painting on the film camera lens with lipstick, slowly led to the creation of this strange world and its pidgin-hybrid language, with the translation aspect there in the show’s title, too. The idea of embracing film techniques was at least partly suggested by the presence of emerging filmmaker Ella Wright during the creative process.
