CHRIS THURMAN: Satirising vanity beautifully is UJ’s staging of The Picture of Dorian Gray

News that the University of Johannesburg’s Arts and Culture division is staging Neil Bartlett’s theatrical version of The Picture of Dorian Gray took me back to Oscar Wilde’s novel, which I read many years ago. The text, first published in 1891, is one of the prescribed literary options for learners writing grade 12 English Home Language for the National Senior Certificate.

School syllabuses veer towards the staid and canonical, but though Dorian Gray appears to tick those boxes it is also darkly comical, a gothic horror story that exposes the viciousness of the British class system and satirises vanity. The tale of a man who effectively sells his soul in return for the appearance of eternal youth and beauty — while his portrait, hidden in an attic, “ages” and absorbs his corruption — remains refreshingly (perhaps depressingly) pertinent.

There is a strong meta-literary, meta-artistic strand running through the novel. The preface that Wilde wrote for later editions in response to his early critics comprises a series of aphorisms about art. They are typically Wildean, somewhere between whimsical and profound, and it is hard to know how seriously to take them; here and in the mouths of the characters, we encounter contradictory claims about art and self-representation.

The preface asserts that art’s aim is to “conceal the artist”. Early in the novel, Basil Hallward, the artist who painted Gray, affirms: “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.” Yet he also complains that “we live in an age when art is treated as autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.”

The author is partially in each of his characters, and none of them entirely. Wilde’s contemporaries associated him with the figure of Lord Henry Wotton, the libertine hedonist whose amoral charm lures Gray into immoral, selfish and violent behaviour. Today Wilde seems closer to Hallward, the committed but insecure artist who cares deeply about the ethics of his vocation.

While this aspect of the novel explores such “timeless” concerns as the relationship between truth and beauty (is the artist’s primary duty to aesthetics?), the premise of the action and the unfolding plot take us directly into terrain that feels disturbingly familiar in 2025.

It is tempting to suggest that smartphone cameras have created an environment in which the inverse of the Dorian Gray phenomenon occurs: instead of a portrait that withers while the real-life subject stays unblemished, we take selfies and curate social media images that present us to the world as picture-perfect while our off-camera lives waste away.

But this neat opposition fails to grasp the extent to which we, too, project what we seek to deny about ourselves onto hateful images that can absorb our (self-)loathing. I mean this in a political sense. Yes, Elon Musk and Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu — or, at least, those are the four whose visages evoke my own most visceral response. You, dear reader, may have other villains in mind (and there are a few cut-price local options).

Is it just possible that we revel in their depravity because it makes us feel virtuous by comparison? The really difficult question, the honest question that The Picture of Dorian Gray prompts, is: “What do we have in common with these hideous faces?” In what ways are we complicit in their cruelty, if only in our mild indifference to or daily disdain for the downtrodden?

Audiences watching the UJ production — and hopefully there will be many who are not just doing so because it is a set work — may not find that their thoughts tend in this self-recriminating direction. Indeed, it has been billed as a “delicious” gothic feast for the eyes and mind, and will no doubt deliver on this promise, with four excellent leads (Jaques de Silva, Andreas Damm, Sanelisiwe Yekani and Liezl de Kock), as well as an ensemble of students from the UJ Arts Academy and members of the Market Theatre Foundation’s Kwasha! company, under the direction of Jade Bowers.

Even this overly earnest arts writer may just settle in for a decadent, entertaining ride.

• ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ is at the Keorapetse William Kgositsile Theatre at the UJ Arts Centre from March 4-16.

This column originally appeared in Business Day.