Overview
By Oscar Wilde
Adapted and directed by Kip Williams
A Sydney Theatre Company production
Bring your senior English class to Kip Williams' Olivier and Tony Award-winning cine-theatre adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, making its Queensland premiere at QPAC. After sold-out runs in London and on Broadway, Nikki Shiels takes on the mantle from Eryn Jean Norvill and Sarah Snook, playing 26 characters in a tour-de-force blend of live performance, stagecraft and video technology.
The Picture of Dorian Gray gives students a rich case study in how a canonical text is transformed for a contemporary audience through adaptation. Through the production, they can explore how performance style, multimedia and cine-theatre technique, design, characterisation, language and dramatic convention work together to shape meaning and shift audience response — and, through Wilde's story of Dorian's descent into vanity and hedonism, engage with the text's enduring questions of morality and consequence.
Curriculum Links
Dramatic forms and styles
Monologue, Heightened Realism, Multidisciplinary Theatre, Comedy of Manners, Camp, Contemporary Performance, Digital/Screen-based Theatre
Themes and ideas
Societal Constructions of Power, Influence of Art, Music and Theatre, The Construction of Identity, Beauty and ageing, Technology and contemporary storytelling
General Capabilities
Literacy, Critical & Creative Thinking, Personal & Social Capability, Ethical Understanding
Senior General Drama
- Unit 2: Reflect - Students explore representational dramatic traditions, including Realism, and investigate contemporary approaches that extend, disrupt or transform realist conventions. The Picture of Dorian Grey provides an opportunity to view the use of Heightened Realism.
- Unit 4: Transform - Students manipulate and shape dramatic languages to reframe text, purpose, context and meaning. The Picture of Dorian Gray provides an opportunity to examine how Kip Williams transforms Wilde's novel through contemporary performance conventions, technology, adaptation and multidisciplinary theatrical practice.
Drama in Practice
- Unit option A: Collaboration
- Unit option C: Contemporary
International Baccalaureate
- The Arts – Theatre
Senior Literature
- Unit 1: Introduction to Literary Studies
- Unit 2: Intertextuality
- Unit 3: Literature and Identity
- Unit 4: Independent explorations
Senior General English
- Unit 1: Perspectives and texts
- Unit 2: Texts and culture
- Unit 3: Textual connections
Year 10 English
The production provides opportunities for students to explore how a literary text is adapted, transformed and reinterpreted for a contemporary audience, and how aesthetic choices influence the representation of character, identity, values and ideas.
- AC9E10LA07: Analyse representations of individuals, groups and places and evaluate how they reflect their context in literary texts by world authors
- AC9E10LE03: Analyse how the aesthetic qualities associated with text structures, language features, literary devices and visual features, and the context in which these texts are experienced, influence audience response
- AC9E10LE04: Evaluate the social, moral or ethical positions represented in literature
- AC9E10LE05: Analyse how text structure, language features, literary devices and intertextual connections shape interpretations of texts
- AC9E10LE07: Analyse and evaluate the aesthetic qualities of texts
- AC9E10LY01: Analyse and evaluate how people, places, events and concepts are represented in texts and reflect contexts
- AC9E10LY03: Analyse and evaluate how language features are used to implicitly or explicitly represent values, beliefs and attitudes
Year 9 and 10 – DRAMA
- AC9ADR10E01: Investigate use of elements of drama, performance skills and/or conventions to communicate and/or challenge ideas, perspectives and/or meaning in drama across cultures, times, places and/or other contexts
- AC9ADR10D01: Develop performance skills and/or techniques to manipulate elements of drama and/or use conventions to communicate the physical and psychological aspects of roles and characters consistent with intentions
- AC9ADR10D02: Reflect on their own and others’ drama or practices to refine and inform their use of elements of drama, conventions and/or approaches to shape and sustain dramatic action
Learning Resources
Learning Resources are coming soon.
Plan Your Visit
Creatives
- Designer Marg Horwell
- Lighting Designer Nick Schlieper
- Composer and Sound Designer Clemence Williams
- Video Designer David Bergman
- With Nikki Shiels