Beauty: what is it good for? The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's 1890 novel, tries to isolate beauty, fence it off from morality, procreation, the body's decay. As the hero's putrefying portrait suggests, it isn't that easy. Matthew Bourne's eagerly anticipated dance version of the story for his New Adventures company updates the setting to contemporary London, focusing on a lad who becomes a billboard icon. Like Dorian himself, it doesn't work, exactly, but it is certainly arresting.
The novel's action stretches over decades, but the cycle of modern celebrity doesn't hang about: mayflies last longer. Where art meets fashion, the default pose is an extreme, world-weary slant, and the queen bee is Michela Meazza's sinuous Lady H, a Devil Wears Prada-style maven who remains fashionably bored even when shagging. Dorian (Richard Winsor) enters this world flunkying at a private view for the lank-haired photographer Basil (Aaron Sillis), a self-appointed genius in skinny jeans. Caught in the arc light, he is initially abashed, but soon learns to turn and crouch for the lens. He and Basil lick vodka off each other's skin and race off to buck and arch, but later Dorian creeps down for another look at the camera. Sex is fine, but this is the real thing: a slow dance, running the camera over his body, smiling tenderly into the lens. He can't get enough of his own image.
Dorian is a beauty with a touch of thug, and everyone wants a piece of him. He becomes the face of a fragrance ("Immortal pour homme", bien sûr), launched in a papping frenzy. Winsor charts Dorian's growing confidence: a jaguar leap, a proud stalk.
Lez Brotherston's incisive revolving set nails a double life - one side an immaculate white screed of photographer's paper, ready to receive fantasy, the other textured and rusty, the back room of the psyche. Central to Bourne's work are characters who retain their innocence despite everything. Dorian, however, can't wait to dump his innocence like a fat friend. He is briefly enthralled by the ballet dancer Cyril Vane (in the book, Sybil the actress), a pouty little number who quickly becomes a clingy kitty. The ballet background could extend the movement register, but Cyril (Chris Marney) doesn't embody much more than swoopy Romanticism. Bourne has always been a wordless dramatist rather than a steps man, but movement could capture beauty's uncanny lurch into transcendence. Here, it doesn't.
There is a nice recurring motif of apparently transparent liquid: scent, vodka, bathwater, none as pure as it seems. Wilde's protagonist must scour London's sewer-washed shadows for his opium kicks, but the modern chemical haze and orgy-boy antics are easy to access. Contempt is still shocking, though: as pilled-up Cyril twitches, Dorian slowly, mockingly withdraws, Winsor's sculpted lips stretching in an ugly, sweaty grin. Instead of the portrait, a doppelgänger creeps round the corner of the set into Dorian's psyche.
The doppelgänger is, on paper, an inspired idea. Here, as in other 19th-century authors like Robert Louis Stevenson and James Hogg, the shadow self slides into a life and takes possession of it. The bifurcated self quickly becomes a curse: in Hans Christian Andersen's chilling tale "The Shadow", the narrator is edged out of his own life by an increasingly popular and successful shadow. Something similar occasionally happens here, the double stealing a march on Dorian, especially when the model throws a moody.
However, Bourne hasn't quite worked out the doppelgänger's function: is it Dorian's evil twin, acting out American Psycho fantasies? Is it a scapesoul, taking the rap for his crimes? Or just another fit bloke in a vest, swelling the numbers at an orgy?
It's already an entertaining, if unresolved evening, despite a forgettable score by Terry Davies. People scamper in circles beneath a skull glitterball, and Dorian, who never met a mirror he didn't like, ends up howling with a vest stretched over his head, hiding from the camera. Bourne likes to tinker, and my hunch is that the show will only get sharper: the plotting will tighten, emotions will breathe, Dorian's dark side will crystallise. And then Bourne may achieve his goal: "an ugly show about beauty".
For tour dates and booking details, visit: http://www.new-adventures.net
Pick of the week
Lipsynch
6-14 Sept, Barbican, London EC2
Epic work by Robert Lepage follows nine lives over seven decades.
A Tale of Two Cities
Until 6 September, West Yorkshire Playhouse
Northern Ballet Theatre dances the Dickens classic.
in-i
From 6 Sept, Lyttelton, London SE1
Juliette Binoche, Akram Khan and Anish Kapoor - together at last.
