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Special Episode: Kip Williams explains ‘Dorian Gray’s Cine-Theatre
00:33:00
On today’s episode, Matt Tamanini is in conversation with the adapter and Tony-nominated director of one of the most innovative and engaging productions on Broadway in years, “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Kip Williams began experimenting with what he n...
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- [00:00]
Matt Tammanini
Foreign Radio. My name is Matt Tammanini. On today's episode, I'm in conversation with the Tony nominated director of one of the most visually innovative, engaging and striking productions you will ever see anywhere, the Picture of Dorian Gray. I am speaking with Kip Williams, who not only directs the show, but is also responsible for the new adaptation of Oscar Wilde's iconic novel. The show is currently playing at the Music Box Theater where it is slated to wrap up on June 29th. This show is one of a handful of productions that Kip developed at the Sydney Theatre Company where he is the artistic director that he describes as Cine Theatre that blurs the line between theater and film work. The show is technically a one woman show starring Sarah snook as all 26 characters in the Story of Dorian Gray. But the printed cast list in the playbill actually has six people listed. The other five are the camera operators. And as Kip describes in our conversation, they are just as integral to this production as any other ensemble member would be in a traditional show. I have to say I've interviewed a lot of people over the years here on Broadway radio and at numerous other outlets, and I don't know that I have ever interviewed somebody who speaks so intelligently about the artistic decisions that they've made. Not only explaining them to a layperson like me so that I can understand them, but giving me deeper insight that makes me appreciate and understand the richness and fully fullness of those decisions. Having seen their execution on stage, of course, I'll have information on where you can purchase tickets to the Picture of Dorian Gray on Broadway if you want to check that out in the show notes. All right. With all of that out of the way, here's my conversation with Tony nominated director, Kip Williams. Well, Kip, I. I do feel like it is appropriate that I'm seeing you on a zoom screen to do this interview, given that we're talking about Dorian Gray. But for people who, I guess, who have seen the show and then for those who haven't seen the show, I was wondering if you could define this idea of Cine Theater and I guess what the goal of employing it is to tell a particular story and in this case the story of Dorian Gray.
- [02:27]
Kip Williams
It'S great, great question. I mean, Cine Theatre is a. Is a Monica that I came up with a couple of years ago in response to this particular production, which was by no means the first time that I'd used live video and cameras on stage. I've been doing that for about 10 years in my practice and developing my own particular relationship to it. But it was the first time I'd ever used an element of prerecord in my shows. And that was significant for me because prior to Dorian, I'd had a sort of monastic rule that all of the video has to be live, but I knew with Dorian that I would be breaking that rule, which took me some time to actually have the courage to do so, by employing an element of prerecord which was specifically deployed to allow the performer to play multiple iterations of themselves simultaneously with their live performance. And the pure moments of Cine Theater in Darien. So this is like the general term, but the pure moments of it are really when there is a simultaneous synthesis of live video, pre recorded and live performance. And those moments are pretty magical when they take place within the production and are really specifically about opening up the central idea in Wild Story that a human is a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, that we contain multitudes and that depending on the context in which we're in, will reveal a different part of that, of that multitude. And so, yeah, that's, that's how the idea came about. And, and yeah, that's what the term means to me.
- [04:03]
Matt Tammanini
What helped you get over your hesitance to get into the prerecord for this, for this production, which is not the, you know, the ones that we've seen with Sarah Snook in London and New York are not the first time you did this, you did this back in Australia to begin with. So what kind of like gave you the push to get over that initial hesitation?
- [04:25]
Kip Williams
I think ultimately the vision that I had for the show persisted. When I came back and read the novel about seven years ago, I was struck by how prophetic it felt that Wilde was talking about a society that was obsessed with youth and beauty and the individual and was a society that was obsessed with performing a kind of curated idea of who you might be, which I think the mobile phone and social media have, have unleashed in our lives to take this sort of essential human task of conveying ourselves to those around us and made it an abstracted, augmented and highly prolific act within our lives. And so the, yeah, the idea to, to deploy this particular form struck me immediately when I, when I read the book. But because it was, you know, breaking my. One of my long held artistic principles, I was terrified of it. And I knew it would be, you know, a hugely ambitious undertaking and would push audiences to engage with live performance in a way that they perhaps hadn't before and would require A kind of level of detail and rigor and choreography unlike anything that I had enacted before as a director. So. So it really was the. The fear of the unknown and the kind of task of taking a big creative leap of faith that prevented me from doing it straight away. But I eventually, I think, just became undeniable that I had to story now and tell it in this way. And so I took that leap.
- [06:04]
Matt Tammanini
Well, and I think it's so interesting talking about the idea that so much of what the novel talks about, about the version of yourself that you put out into the world and then marrying it with the social media aspects of today and the video aspects of the other element of that that really struck me when I saw the production is that Dorian Gray and then obviously all of the other characters are played by a woman. First Erin Jean Norville in Australia, and then Sarah Snook in London and in the US Was that a conscious decision about the impact that society and social media and just the world in general, have on women and how they have to present themselves? Or was it just. This is interesting. I think Aaron, or whomever you had in mind at the beginning would be great to do this. Where did the idea to kind of make that transition from a male focused story in the original novel to a female centered production on stage?
- [06:55]
Kip Williams
Great question. Also say Nikki Shields performed in the role in Melbourne. Okay, great. And New Zealand as well. Yeah. I mean, I've been very lucky to work with these incredible artists in bringing the show to life. Look, it was an instinctual response to the text, and it's a thematic that runs throughout a lot of my work. But, you know, and I think all of the readings that you speak to. I'm interested in being available to an audience, and the audience is having their own idiosyncratic response to it. But what it does formally for the piece is that it foregrounds the way in which we perform gender. It makes that act that all people of all genders are engaged in daily in their lives of performing ideas of masculinity and femininity. That sort of drag act that Sarah undertakes is one of the most immediate acts of performance that the audience witnesses. And so within that is an expression of not only the performance of identity, but the sort of artifice of it, the construction of it. And it's alive within the sort of Brechtian language of the production as well. But the audience might see a sort of fully realized image on the screen, but they're seeing the deconstructed artifice before them on the Stage at all times live. So that idea was very interesting. Interesting to me. There are also sort of other aspects of it that, that are activated. It immediately queers the performance and obviously Dorian Gray's in the text. And it also does really interesting things because it creates a kind of critical distance between Sarah's gender and the gender of a lot of the characters and at times can allow there to be a critical perspective on some of the toxic behavior that some of the male characters like Lord Henry enact. It does something really interesting, which I want audiences to discover themselves in terms of how Sibyl Vane sits within the piece and the philosophy that she offers Dorian as a counterpoint to Lord Henry. But ultimately, for me, the thing that I really love about it in the. In the querying of the piece is that as the narrator character, who is ostensibly female, and Dorian wrestle for their narratorial control of the story and ultimately collide and become the one figure. You start the story in a place where there is that sort of critical distance between the former's gender and most of the characters they're playing. But by the center of the piece, when those two figures collide, the gender binary explodes and Dorian, this figure becomes a character who sits within a non binary philosophy of gender. And I, I love that. I think Oscar would love that as well. It feels very. The ideas that he's exploring in the novel.
- [09:47]
Matt Tammanini
It's so fascinating to hear you break it down that way because as I was talking about it, I was like. Or as you were talking about it, I was thinking, that is very Oscar Wilde. It does feel like while Oscar Wilde never could have imagined a production like this with the use of cameras and video, the themes and the elements feel very true to who he was. Not only in terms of this kind of horror focused telling, but also kind of the humor, playful aspects of him that we see through so many of his other works.
- [10:15]
Kip Williams
Yeah, I mean, he's such a subversive mind, isn't he? And he's so funny in the way that he. His true camp in the sense in which he pokes a hole in the surface of reality and highlights its artifice and in doing so allows us to laugh at the absurdity of life. Um, you know, and my relationship to Wilde began as a, you know, queer teenager in, in high school in Sydney at an all boys school, performing in a production of the Importance of Being Earnest.
- [10:45]
Matt Tammanini
And.
- [10:45]
Kip Williams
And because I was in a single gender, you know, some of us played the women in, in the piece and I played Cecily Cardew, one of his great characters. And so my. My. My genesis point in. In Discovering Wild was through the lens of performing gender and the way in which we construct those ideas of. Of femininity and masculinity. And also the. The sort of human conundrum of how you navigate that part of your identity which, you know, that. That's a play entirely about the tension between artifice and truth. So, you know, that was. It was an amazing entry point into his writing to experience it through that lens of literally performing gender and definitely was a sort of lens that stuck with me and obviously expresses itself in this production in a really profound way.
- [11:41]
Matt Tammanini
Yeah. Hearing how thoughtful and detailed each twist and turn of this production is for you, it does make me wonder what goes into this. The decision to decide which moments are going to be played completely for the camera and which ones are going to be available both on screen but on stage. Because there are moments when, even though you can still see Sarah a little bit upstage, the audience is essentially blocked by the cameras and you are forced to look at the screens. What goes into saying this moment makes sense to have both, and this moment makes sense to be only available via the screens at the top of the stage.
- [12:22]
Kip Williams
Some of it's instinctual, which, you know, I can sort of subsequently unpack the, you know, rationale behind. But. But particularly the opening 20 minutes where she's upstage of. Of the screen. I really wanted the audience to be forced to enter into this story about portraiture and how we perform ourselves for an audience through. Through the lens of. Of the portrait, the screens, which are, as you know, from having seen the show in portrait orientation, that it was entirely about almost testing the audience in that first 20 minutes of having to engage with the storyteller through the artifice, through that extreme act of performance. And I think it also does a really important task in setting up the relationship between camera and performer in the piece, which I think is where a lot of my video work differs from. From a number of other practitioners in that, you know, often a camera, and I think in cinema and television this is the case, but certainly on stage as well, can be deployed to give you a kind of additional. Additional access to information. You know, to break it down in a really crude sense. You know, you're being. You are being shown something, but to be shown something is an innately passive experience. I am being shown, which is really different from how I use cameras, which is about looking, which is an active task, where, you know, I think in the sense in which Oscar Wilde sees life as A grand act of theater where people are performing and creating a character for the audience around them. I extend that relationship between audience and performer through the use of camera, where the audience is looking actively at character and there is an acknowledged relationship, dialogue, almost like a Shakespearean aside, through the camera. And that very kind of active action, active looking, you know, is really central to how the drama of this story operates. Dorian locks his portrait away because he is intensely aware of the way in which he is looked at externally by his society and he wishes to hide a part of himself. But more interestingly, and I think this is the sort of enduring genius of Wilde's narrative, concede he is looked at by his portrait. And it's in that way that Wilde creates a physical manifestation of the. Of the observing relationship we have in every second of our life. And that's the relationship with ourself. It's the. It's the mind or soul or the ID that is watching everything that we do. And that's how the portrait operates. And so for this production, I really wanted that camera to be the active audience, to take an active audience role of looking and place it in the POV of the portrait. So you never see the portrait in this production, you only take on its pov and the audience is actively becoming that portrait, regulating Dorian and seeing the truth of who he is. So it's a long answer to your question, but it's very deliberately constructed in that way to constantly play with that relationship of being looked at.
- [15:40]
Matt Tammanini
It's interesting you say it that way, because one of the moments that I thought was, in the grand scheme of things, not probably the riskiest thing that happens in the production, but to me, that I thought was kind of. It was both fun, but also cool, but also acknowledging how, I don't know, vulnerable this whole thing is, or how you're kind of walking a wire is when you start using, and I guess this is a spoiler for people who haven't seen it, when you start using what at least to the audience, looks like Snapchat filters. When I was there, there were moments when, because of where Sarah turned her head, the filter wasn't there, and then she turns back, and then it is. To me, I just thought that was so cool because it was allowing there to be imperfections in the video presentation of this that otherwise is so beautifully curated. I thought that that especially where it happens in the show was. I don't know, I almost felt that was like almost just as, if not more artistic than the rest of the use of the really, really highly skilled, professional video work.
- [16:44]
Kip Williams
Thank you, man. I'm really thrilled to hear that. That's amazing. I mean, I completely agree with you. It's, you know, it's also the life. And I think it's why the video ultimately works. Sort of two reasons, really, in the piece. They're the same reason. It's live. The whole thing is live. The audience knows that it's live. And, you know, it's also built around. So the second reason built around this sort of very analog, ancient form of theater, of a storyteller coming directly to you to tell you a story. So for all sort of contemporary technology, that's the form that motors the piece. I'm being told a story directly live. But the technology itself, as you say, is a live thing. And there is a sort of also sense of kind of vaudevillian circus within the tightrope walk of what Sarah does. That, I think, is one of the dramatic tensions of the piece, too, that makes it so compelling and arresting. But that tension point that you identify between the filter that will transform her face sometimes into something grotesque, but often into something highly curated and beautiful, and then the truth that's behind that, that you see within those flicker points, is that that moment in itself, formally, is a pure expression of Wilde's story. And the filter moment is one of the moments, directorially, that I'm most proud of within the piece. But it was also one of the most terrifyingly challenging to conceive of because it comes at a point in the story where Wilde does this sort of very radically different thing within the novel. He's sort of writing in a relatively linear way. I mean, the whole narrative is linear in terms of how it relates to the progression of time. But he does this huge time jump in the center of the story where you jump 18 years in Dorian's life. But he does so via this different sort of form where he delves into a dissertation on aesthetics, essentially. And when I came to sort of think of how that might be staged, you know, it was really kind of challenging to think about how up until that point, it's very kind of drama, action led. And then we go into this big piece of philosophical meditation right in the center of the story. And I ultimately sort of landed in the conceit that if Wilde was going to jump us 18 years in Dorian's life, then aesthetically, the production, which up until that point has started in Brecht, but then layered into Victorian Gothic period, that we should jump the audience 135 years into the present. And so the mobile phone enters on stage right at the point when Wilde jumps in. Clemence Williams score goes from being period Victorian gothic into contemporary. And you hear Donna Summer and electronic music and Mark Hawa's costumes go from period into starting to reference Bad Bunny and Harry Styles and Prince. And, you know, suddenly the story becomes this fascinating discourse between the past and the present. Yeah. And, you know, the. Those moments of the mobile phones being used within it are both a kind of deep mirror to the lives we're living right now. They feel, you know, it's exciting to feel the audience suddenly go, oh, this story is about 20, 25. But also is so connected to this struggle to navigate self that Wild was wrestling with 135 years ago.
- [20:24]
Matt Tammanini
Yeah, I can't believe we've talked about 18 minutes now and haven't really gotten into the wonder that is Sarah Snook. And it really is a herculean performance that she is given, especially because the show is two hours, no intermission, and very rarely is she ever offstage. And if she is ever offstage, she's got a camera following her first, I guess. Was there ever the conversation of maybe this is asking too much to do eight shows a week? And I know there's a few six performance weeks built into the schedule, but, like, this is a lot for one person.
- [21:01]
Kip Williams
It is a lot for one person. Yes. She does it twice a day sometimes, which, I mean, I directed the thing. I still find that staggering to witness. There are moments where I wonder if I've been too sadistic a director in the things that are. That are asked of the performer in this piece. But, you know, Sarah has this. Obviously we know that she is one of the great actors of her generation and. And I was so excited, you know, that she was doing this off the back of succession because it's so different from the work that most people know of hers. And I was so thrilled that, you know, her full genius would be on display within this piece and that people would get to discover that. And coming to see it was sort of, kind of like great thing about it. But outside of those sort of immeasurable artistic and creative gifts that she has, she also has this relentless work ethic. You know, she just wants to keep going and dig deeper. And, you know, even last week on Wednesday, Sarah and I were sort of huddled in her dressing room furiously discussing a certain scene and how we were thinking about a particular line as. As our stage manager was knocking on the door saying, sarah, you've got to get on stage now, you know, we love to kind of keep interrogating it and re. Prosecuting it and, and working on it and, and that has been one of the greatest joys for me in, in collaborating with Sarah on this is that, you know, there's, she, she, she can climb an extremely high mountain, but you sort of think you've reached the, the summit. And she goes, no, there's, there's, there's that bit over there that we can still go to and, and that's, that's pretty thrilling.
- [22:51]
Matt Tammanini
And there are some similarities with Sarah Snoop coming off the success of Succession, coming off of what I'm assuming will be the success of Wicked for good at the end of this year. You're going to go directly into Dracula with Cynthia erivo early in 2026. While obviously very different projects that your actors that are going to be coming off of and very different projects in Dorian Gray and Dracula, there are a lot of similarities between the fact that I think the world knows these two performers for a certain type of thing and now going to have the opportunity to do something very different. We've seen Sarah do it and I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to see Cynthia do it coming up in just a little under a year now. At this point, I think it might even be closed a year from now. I think the run will be wrapping up about this time. Obviously I'm not going to ask you to give us away all the secrets of what is coming with Dracula, but what are you most looking forward to about this process, which I'm assuming is a pretty labor intensive rehearsal process for something like this with Cynthia?
- [23:55]
Kip Williams
Yeah, it really is an incredibly labor intensive rehearsal process. And you know, I mean, like Sarah, Cynthia is an art of virtuoso, you know, both a kind of chameleonic powerhouse, technical powerhouse, and her dramaturgical mind. I mean, that's one of the things from the past few weeks in beginning to work on it with her is incredible and so exciting, you know, and for me as the director, you know, you want to have that relationship, that discourse with the actors that you're working with, where it's about character, but it's also about the story as well and how we're approaching it. So that really excites me and thrills me about working with Cynthia. And you know, their sibling works, Dorian and Dracula, and there's a third sibling, Jekyll and Hyde. They're part of a trilogy of works. Thematically and formally they're link, although they're very Distinct from one another in the way in which they relate to form. The thing that's so thrilling about Dracula is the way in which we get to interrogate and prosecute the myth of the vampire. And one of the things that Cynthia and I have been talking about is the sort of inversion of this idea of the vampire being an external force, but actually rather it being a kind of an internal force to grapple with. And, you know, her. Her ability to get the absolute heart and soul of a character and the deep psyche of a character and the emotional truth of a character is pretty unparalleled. And. And I'm. Yeah, I feel very, very lucky that I get to work with her on this. And, you know, I think audiences will be pretty. Pretty blown away by what she creates.
- [25:45]
Matt Tammanini
I have no doubt. Obviously, as we said, it'll begin performances, I think, in February in London of 2026. Who knows if that might end up in the States at some point? I think a lot of us are knocking on wood and hoping that it does. But I'll wrap up with one last question. As the writer and the director of the Picture of Dorian Gray, as somebody who, as you said, you're still sitting in Sarah's dressing room talking about the show and diving deep into it. Is there a favorite moment for you in the show? Whether it is in something that you're marveling at what Sarah does on a daily basis or kind of wondering about, how did we come up with this? Or even the reaction that you get from the audience. Is there something that when you're in the theater for a given performance, you're like, oh, this is the special sauce right here. This is the thing that we were really shooting for when working on this production.
- [26:41]
Kip Williams
That's a great question. There are a couple throughout it. I mean, I love the wood scene where the screens and the cameras, bit of a spoiler. Disappear for the first time in the show and this sort of force of being watched or being looked at is removed, and Dorian is able to, for the first time in years, be with themselves. And Sarah acts that moment so exquisitely and so movingly, and you just feel the audience in. You know, you can hear a pin drop during that moment. And I think I really love that the final scene as well, where that force returns. And, you know, we've journeyed through two hours of stage time where the narrator had all this agency and control over how all the theatrical elements and in particularly the cameras were being orchestrated and as they've been subsumed into Dorian, and Dorian has Lost control of his moral centre. By that final scene, those cameras swirl about Sarah like a kind of haranguing, maraudering force of vultures. This sort of inescapable eye that Dorian cannot escape from being looked at by. And yeah, I find that scene very moving as well. She's extraordinary in that scene. But probably one of my favorite moments actually is the very end, which is sort of. This is a very strange thing to say, is the curtain call. And not just because, you know, the audience response is incredibly beautiful. But Sarah invites the entire crew on stage to bow with her every night. And you sort of witness the ensemble piece that this really is. You know, people ask me about directing a one person show, but this has really been like directing an incredible ensemble with all the kind of detail and rigor and choreography and rhythm of a huge cast. And all of these crew members have collaborated with Sarah in those two hours to bring this story to life for the audience. And, you know, I see that expression of, of the ensemble and of the collaboration and community spirit of that as a really beautiful end note to this story about the dangers of solipsism and, and unchecked ego. So. So yeah, those are, those are.
- [29:23]
Matt Tammanini
No, I think that's great. I think. I agree, like the last 15, 20 minutes of the show, I think the whole thing is great. But having built up everything to lead into that final section is incredible. And you mentioned the ensemble and I think what is so interesting is that we've seen so many shows over the last decade or whatever that use live video. I'm probably wrong, but to my recollection, this is the only time I think that all of the camera members are listed in the playbill as cast members, which I think goes into saying about how important their role is in. So congratulations on that because I think that's a testament to the work that they do. And I lied. I have one more question as you were talking, and I don't know how much you can talk about this, I don't know how much you want to talk about this, but the rights for this, the film rights, have been acquired by somebody that you have worked with quite a bit over the years with Cate Blanchett. How is that going to work in a cine theater cinema? I don't know. What is that looking like? If you can explain anything moving forward.
- [30:28]
Kip Williams
You need to flip the words like theatrema or something. Yeah, look, it's in its very nascent stages of development. It's obviously been a huge task realizing the show for Broadway and Sarah And I really wanted to develop and iterate a number of ideas for Broadway as well, which we have done. So I begin to turn my mind to that, as when the Broadway season comes to a close in a month or so. But, you know, the, the. The story. I'm always a director that's led by finding a way for the form to. To be an expression in and of itself of the ideas of the story. And we've spoken to that in this conversation. And. And so one of the places my mind is at at the moment is it is really starting to pick apart what it is about cinema that. That can specifically speak to this story, that looks at how we construct artifice and perform ideas of ourselves. You know, I think one of the things that's been so beautiful about getting to work on the story in the way that I have in, in the theater is that it references so many different traditions of storytelling. Yes, cinematic, but, like, mostly theatrical. You know, there's clowning in there, there's puppetry in there, there's vaudeville in there. There's a constant reference to the different ways in which we have, over the years, told stories in the theater. And literally, we go to the theater in the story as well. So I'll be fascinated to kind of begin a process creatively of doing the same thing, but thinking about it through the lens of purely of cinema. And, yeah, I'll be excited to see what unfolds.
- [32:20]
Matt Tammanini
And it's so. It's so fascinating that you still aren't sure exactly what's going to happen with that. Like, I think that's exciting for us because it means that we're going to see something that is completely reimagined for whatever medium we're going to get it in. Well, Kip, thank you so much for this conversation. Congratulations on everything. Obviously, I. I thought that it was one of the most engaging and arresting things I've seen in a long, long time. So I was thrilled to talk with you and I congratulate you on all this success and everything else that's coming up down the pipe.
- [32:47]
Kip Williams
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.