The Picture of Dorian Gray

About this event

Ran Chai Bar-zvi’s production strips Oscar Wilde’s novel down to an intense, sleek three‑hander set inside a white‑cube gallery. A rotating wooden wall and fetish‑inflected costumes by Belle Santos (latex, lack, glitter) turn the Kammerspiele stage into a coolly artificial playing field. At the centre is the beautiful young Dorian (Mitja Over, androgynous and cherub‑like), who sits for the smitten painter Basil (Miguel Klein Medina), while the dandyish Lord Henry (Stefan Graf, delivering Wilde’s aphorisms with ice‑cold charm) seduces him into a life of hedonistic selfishness. Their flirtations and cruelties are played with such razor‑sharp timing that the early seduction scene glows with tension, released cathartically in a disco sequence to Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams” that puts the entire stage in motion. The play doesn’t stop at Wilde’s ending. After the velvet curtain falls, the three actors break the frame and deliver a world‑premiere commentary by playwright Marcus Peter Tesch: a raw, lyrical monologue about bodies, self‑image, and the relentless self‑marketing of the social‑media age. It names the queer subtext that was merely hinted at in the Victorian original, and it confronts the audience with the mirror of their own online obsessions. Evelyn Saylor’s original compositions pulse through the evening, and Frank Kraus’s lighting – including strobe effects and rapid shifts – reinforces the sense of a beautiful surface about to crack. At just under 90 minutes with no interval, the production is compact, precise, and deliberately showy. It has been praised for the magnetic performances of its three cast members, especially Graf’s cruel yet magnetic Lord Henry, and for the way it balances Wilde’s wit with a critical look at contemporary narcissism. The language is German; English‑speaking visitors should be comfortable following the familiar story, but the verbal play and Tesch’s concluding text land best if you understand German. The production contains sexually explicit talk and stylised violence, and is aimed squarely at adults and older teenagers.