Costume design by Marg Horwell
Worn by Eryn Jean Norvill
Made by Mary Anne Lawler
Costume 1: Cotton short, wool pants
Costume 2: damask suit, sari trim, floral applique
Few productions in the history of STC have been as rapturously received as Kip Williams' cine-theatre adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. The play enjoyed three sold out seasons in Sydney before touring to Auckland, Melbourne and Adelaide, and will soon open on London’s West End in February 2024.
The centrepiece of the production was a bravura performance by Eryn Jean Norvill, playing all 26 of the play's characters, often acting against prerecorded versions of herself projected on one of the seven moving LCD screens.
Each character required their own unique costumes, some pulled from STC's costume store, and many being hand made by the Costume Team.
Costume Designer Marg Horwell collaborated with Norvill to achieve the bold looks for Williams' reimagining.
Excerpt from Making The Picture of Dorian Gray by Ben Neutze
Limelight, 4 Jan 2021
Many of the looks for Norvill – who plays the predominantly male characters from the novel live – were honed over the course of rehearsal.
Finding the right looks required the team to lean into the queerness of Wilde’s writing and the role-playing at the centre of the production.
"If we went really typically masculine with the look, it never really read as masculine – it read strangely stuck on or something," Horwell says. "So she wears heels through the whole show, which is something we found in rehearsals. We found that she’s more masculine when she’s corseted than wearing a man’s coat."
Excerpt from The Picture of Dorian Gray: the 'magic tricks' and technical feats behind STC’s smash hit – in pictures by Steph Harmon
The Guardian, 2 Jan 2021
Understandably, the show requires a lot from the costume department. "EJ is wearing so many clothes on stage!" explains the designer, Marg Horwell. "She’s often wearing two costumes at once to enable a quick change from character to character, but she’s also wearing kneepads and mic belts and a wig cap underneath everything. She gets covered in glue from the repeated application and removal of sideburns and facial hair and most of it happens in full view of the audience."
"We wanted to always tread the line between masculine and feminine, period and contemporary and to become increasingly aware of the construction of this character, the layers of artifice and veneer," Horwell continues. "Dorian is inspired by Prince and PJ Harvey, Harry Styles and Troye Sivan. For the look pictured here Kip said, 'Let’s design a period look for the Met Gala.'"