Star rating: ****
Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray has been brooding away on Matthew Bourne's "to do" list for years - not that Bourne hasn't been busy creating globally successful "dansicals" such as Nutcracker!, Edward Scissorhands, The Car Man and, of course, his celebrated version of Swan Lake with all-male swans.
This 21st-century Dorian Gray is, however, his boldest - and raciest - venture yet. On one level it's a narrative of Dorian's descent into a celebrity hell where his looks bring him billboard fame - his photograph is used to advertise a fragrance, Immortal, for men; that fame brings him sex, drugs and an increasing disregard for others which results in brutality and death. But, at the same time, Bourne pithily depicts the kind of society so obsessed with image and "being famous for being famous" that it needs the constant titillation of new faces, new gossip, new trends. Wickedly witty details nail the context as our own times (look out for the Jonathan Ross moment).
One thing you won't miss, even if you blink, is the full-on raunch of the sexual encounters. A swarm of half-clad beautiful young things gyrating before the camera lens of Basil Hallward (Aaron Sillis) sets the temperature at high-and- rising. The photographer's ensuing seduction of Dorian (Richard Winsor) is the first in a series of male duets that crackle with jaw-droppingly athletic lust. Winsor's Dorian is eye-candy extraordinaire, and knows it. Sillis, lean and with the swagger of a hot celebrity snapper, moves like a dominatrix's whiplash, while Michela Meazza, the manipulative Lady H, is a slink of couture-clad evil with alarmingly long legs. Bourne's twist on Wilde's tale is to give Dorian a doppelganger, but the real wrong-doer here is modern society. Wilde and wild in all the most brilliantly telling ways.
A version of this appeared in Saturday's later editions.
