The Most Infamous Narcissist in Literary History Gets a Smartphone

The Atlantic

04-05-2025

In some ways, Oscar Wilde's 1890 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, a horror-tinged Victorian critique of the perils of existing in thrall to one's own image, is a story ready-made for 2025. The title character, a young man of striking beauty, begins the novel as a vain but apparently harmless naif. By the end, his possession of a magical portrait that ages and bears the physical marks of his sins while his own face and body remain unchangingly youthful and innocent has turned him into a monster. It's an intentionally superficial edit of the Faust story: A man barters away his soul in exchange for his heart's desire, but rather than yearning for something tinged with nobility—true wisdom, say, or love—he just wants to be gorgeous, forever. He gives up substance for surface; that is his tragedy.
And oh, does Sarah Snook's new one-actor take on The Picture of Dorian Gray, now on Broadway, make hay of the obvious parallels to our time, in which social media has made the drive to maintain an idealized aesthetic more powerful than ever. Snook, who received a Tony nomination this week, plays 26 roles, with the help of elaborate wigs and even more elaborate camerawork. Mostly, the latter is performed by a crew of operators who follow her throughout the show. But midway through, Snook herself takes charge, using a smartphone to broadcast herself to a giant screen suspended above the stage as she embarks on a hedonistic rampage. Playing with filters, she gives her face an unsettling porcelain-doll perfection, then zooms out, cackling with glee as she strips the effect away to show her true face.
Putting a smartphone in the hands of perhaps the most infamous narcissist in literary history plays humorously, and ominously: Dorian isn't just thrilled by his supernatural ability to maintain a flawless visage; he's also highly aware of—and titillated by—the gap between the false perfection he embodies and the truth of who he is. The act of deception has become, for him, not just a conduit to pleasure, but a source of pleasure itself.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray is one of two starry new stateside arrivals from London in which a single actor plays every part in a classic story adapted for a modern moment; the other, Vanya, starring Andrew Scott, is quiet and introspective where Dorian Gray is frenetic and exaggerated. And at a time when the omnipresence of social media has brought a kind of self-conscious posturing to the cultural forefront, the two offer markedly different ideas about what it means to imagine oneself as a character, or several, to be watched.
The Wilde adaptation, written and directed by Kip Williams, twists that critique into one tailored for a very different kind of image-centric era from Wilde's own, using the device of a single actor to develop a pointed reflection on the ways in which performing a persona for others can rot away every trace of an interior life. Vanya, adapted by Simon Stephens from Anton Chekhov's turn-of-the-century original, makes for something of a counterpoint, suggesting that there's extraordinary richness to be found in seeing yourself as the embodiment of multiple intertwining voices, and letting those voices freely engage with one another.
In the difference between them lies a question bedeviling modern culture as it decides whether new norms forged by social media are forces of corruption, opportunity, or both: When is putting on a performance a perversion of the truth, and when is it a kind of manifestation—a way of becoming more freely oneself?
Dorian Gray is skeptical of its own medium, full of warnings about the dangers of misinterpreting an act as reality. In a scene partway through the play, Dorian brings his friends Basil Hallward, the painter of the ill-fated portrait, and Lord Henry Wotton, a gadabout intent on corrupting Dorian's soul, to see his new fiancée, Sibyl Vane, act in a production of Romeo and Juliet. Snook, live onstage, portrays Sibyl as she turns in an outrageously bad performance as Juliet; Dorian and his friends—three pretaped videos of Snook in various wigs and cravats—watch. (Snook acts across from filmed, fabulously costumed versions of herself throughout the play, which works out to be part film, part theater.)
So we get to see, in real time, a multipronged scrutiny: The men judge Sibyl; Dorian's friends judge him for loving her (and, in particular, for seeming to have radically misrepresented her talents); Dorian, in turn, judges himself for being so smitten by an incompetent actor. Later, Sibyl explains to Dorian that her bad performance was intentional, a renunciation of the emotive lies that acting requires, now that her love for Dorian has shown her how much more profound real feelings can be. But to the men observing her, her failure of performance equates to a failure of self. Her apparent ineptitude as an actress makes her irrelevant as a human being.
That each of these characters—both those doing the judging and those being judged—is played by the same person crisply illustrates the scene's bigger point. While the text of the play suggests that the superficiality Dorian and his peers embrace is a poison that destroys everything it touches (as it will soon destroy Sibyl), the scene as Snook plays it produces a strange secondary effect: We watch as the actor also essentially spreads the poison to different iterations of herself. Yes, the characters are showing how a society over-interested in preening and posturing can obliterate the tender parts of a person, such as the inchoate, even contradictory feelings of someone newly in love. But the shades of Snook are showing, too, how a single person, overinvested in meeting those norms, can obliterate themselves.
There is an overt moral in this for the social-media age, cannily invoked by the production's use of tropes recognizable to anyone who's spent a few minutes on TikTok or Instagram. You can hardly open one of those apps without encountering a video in which a creator dons goofy costumes to play every part in a funny little skit; at the Dorian Gray matinee I attended, the first appearance of the multiple Snooks elicited knowing giggles from viewers who had seen this trick before. But those initially innocuous references slowly take on a dire tinge. At the end of her smartphone-editing spree, Snook takes an Ellen DeGeneres–at-the-Oscars-style selfie with the audience, then gleefully manipulates her own lovely visage in it into a monstrously distorted mask—the closest the play comes to showing us the horrors of Dorian's hidden portrait. The fact that she can toggle back and forth between the ideal picture and the grotesque one is a source of manic joy for her: What a thrill, to be able to present yourself as perfect while knowing that you are, at heart, willfully ugly.
The message to us is clear—because everyone reflexively smiles to take their part in the horrifying tableau. (I did.) It's easy for those watching the show—or reading the original novel—to scorn the unthinking ease with which Dorian and his enablers give up their humanity for the satisfaction of turning in a flawless performance for their peers. ('I love acting. It is so much more real than life,' Lord Henry Wotton says in the book.) But we've just shown that we're on the way to doing the same. We're part of the performance too.
One of the apparent costs of putting ourselves constantly on display is the risk of flattening the complexity of what lies within. Yet there might be a way to express ourselves, to be in and of the world, without losing our interior richness. Vanya suggests that with the right touch, doing so can even be a form of liberation.
In contrast to Dorian Gray 's technological wonderland, Vanya is starkly analog. The props that Scott uses onstage are notably low-key: a tape player, a player piano, an electric kettle. And although he initially distinguishes his characters from one another with telling accessories and mannerisms, he eventually comes to differentiate them with little more than a shift in expression and voice. So we come to see them emerging, one after the other, from within him, passing across his face as if Scott's emotions each take on the characters of fully realized people.
Vanya, which examines the crumbling relationships within a family managing financial woes while stuck in close quarters on a country estate, is a story about the ways people delude and deprive themselves, and how their intimate misunderstandings of themselves can ripple outward, quietly changing the course of other lives too. The plot is propelled by everyday self-deceptions, the kind that could make someone marry a partner they actually dislike—as Helena, the beautiful young wife of the delusional film auteur whose late first wife owned the estate, comes to suspect she might have—or believe that their beloved local doctor's drinking really isn't that big of a problem.
But as in Dorian Gray, the interactions of a set of closely linked characters take on a different meaning when all of them have the same face. So when Scott plays a scene in which Helena sees perfectly well what the plain but good-hearted Sonia, the auteur's daughter by his first wife, cannot—that Sonia's passion for the alcoholic doctor is never going to be reciprocated—it reads less as a delicate difference of perception between two friends than as a careful compartmentalization of truth within a self. One part adores; the other part knows that that adoration may be unreturned but—at least at first—lets it continue, out of an understanding that if the love were quenched, some essential part of the shared self would die.
You must be every part of yourself to be all of yourself, Scott's sensitive exploration of these linked characters suggests. It is natural to have many different selves, and the ways they interact, when given the chance to speak honestly with one another—as Scott's quiet, tormented souls so movingly do—can be powerful. At both the start and the end of Vanya, Scott walks to the edge of the stage and flicks a switch on the wall, sending the theater into darkness. He has complete control over how much we see; he's letting us in as a favor, not because he's interested in the attention. The audience has been optional all along.