Rebecca Hall: "Textual purists will probably be very upset with me"

Well, no, honey, it's not your fault the filmmakers decided to invent a whole new character!

From scifi.com: Dorian Gray Goes Wilde

"And then I arrive after the 25-year gap period as his child that's grown up. So the idea is that she's sort of a new woman and quite spirited and a feminist and a photographer. And that's probably all I am at liberty to tell you without giving away any guts."

I just don't know what to say about that.

New Links

The NY Times has an article on a recent donation to the Morgan Library & Museum that includes some of Wilde's letters and manuscripts. Exciting stuff!

This article about Rebecca Hall's new film Frost/Nixon goes some way to putting my fears at rest be describing her role in DG as "small". Perhaps Emily Wotton isn't a replacement for Sybil Vane after all.

Stephen Fry on Wilde and Chekhov

Stephen Fry has written a new blog post about Oscar Wilde and Anton Chekhov, having just done audio recordings of some of their works. He writes of Wilde's underrated short stories with the kind of passion that should help greatly in getting these works read more wildly. Wilde's fairy tales are, for me, on a par with The Picture of Dorian Gray in terms of beauty, genius, and even wit. In them Wilde holds back nothing, as you feel he is sometimes doing with his plays; he is unafraid to be honest and sincere about the beauty of the world and the flaws of the world. "Beauty" is the term I keep using for I find the fairy tales are saturated with it, even when describing the aspects of life that are ugly. I must agree with Stephen Fry when he says:

Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales continue to exert the same pull over the imagination and emotions as they did when he first read them to his children in the 1880s. Written with inspired poetic intensity and sudden flowerings of the matchless wit for which he is so well remembered, the stories combine the wisdom of parables with the impact of drama. I have loved them since I was a child: indeed they continue to make a child of me.

To illustrate, perhaps a quote from one of the stories, hard as it is to pull a suitably pithy one at random. From close to the end of "The Happy Prince":

‘I am glad that you are going to Egypt at last, little Swallow,’ said the Prince, ‘you have stayed too long here; but you must kiss me on the lips, for I love you.’

‘It is not to Egypt that I am going,’ said the Swallow. ‘I am going to the House of Death. Death is the brother of Sleep, is he not?’

And he kissed the Happy Prince on the lips, and fell down dead at his feet.

At that moment a curious crack sounded inside the statue, as if something had broken. The fact is that the leaden heart had snapped right in two. It certainly was a dreadfully hard frost.

Interview with Ben Barnes

TeenHollywood.com has an interview with Ben Barnes in which they ask a few questions about the Dorian Gray film (skip to pages 9 and 10 for those). Ben mentions something I've also previously noted when he says:

A lot of the previous adaptations of it were The Portrait of Dorian Gray and about the portrait and what happens to Dorian. Our version is just called Dorian Gray and we're trying to look a little more into the experience of what the character goes through.

Fair enough, although there's good precedent for The Portrait or The Picture of Dorian Gray given that that is, in fact, the book's title.

Originally, people would say that you can't identify with a character who sins and is manipulated so easily and falls into this vortex with no notion of redemption so we teased some of the stuff toward the end to keep it tense.

I'm not entirely sure what Ben's saying here, but I myself am becoming more and more convinced that the ending of the novel is redemptive, at least symbolically. Dorian's not damned forever, because if his soul is the portrait, then in the end it is cleansed and remade, while his body bears the weight of his sins in death. The question, then, is whether this salvation carries forward to his soul after death, or if it is merely an earthly redemption, but Wilde never goes that far.

Last quote:

Ben: It's quite a rock and roll story actually. It's about this guy whose parents have been killed and he's been raised by an abusive grandfather.

Not an aspect of the story that I've ever thought of as having much of an influence on Dorian -- he sort of enters the story as a blank slate, ripe for Lord Henry to write on (and no, that's not a euphemism) -- but it could add an interesting extra dimension to the characterisation.