Everyone’s wild about Eryn Jean Norvill. Joanna Wane finds out why.
In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty … The Picture of Dorian Gray
When Oscar Wilde first published The Picture of Dorian Gray, critics of the day described it as “poisonous” and “heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction”. Wilde, a 19th-century influencer who was cancelled before we had names for that kind of thing, may not have agreed with the sentiment, but he probably appreciated the colourful turn of phrase.
His novel is now considered a Gothic masterpiece, and there are plenty of contemporary parallels to be found in this homoerotic tale of an Adonis with a monster in his attic. After being painted by a besotted admirer, Gray becomes corrupted by his own beauty. In a Faustian trade, his face of “ivory and rose leaves” remains unblemished while his portrait gets older and uglier by the day.
Over the past century, the fable of Dorian Gray has been performed dozens of times for the stage and screen, inspiring a Danish silent movie, an opera, a Korean musical and a Get Smart episode. There’s even a Marvel Comics version. The latest adaptation, by Australian theatre director Kip Williams, is perhaps the most radical yet.
Headlining the Auckland Arts Festival in March, its contemporary setting skewers the vices and vanities of a more technologically advanced but equally self-absorbed age. The opium den where Gray seeks oblivion is a laser-lit nightclub, selfies are Facetuned to perfection, and Botox injections are routine.
So far, some 60,000 people have seen the show. By all accounts, its Aussie star, Eryn Jean Norvill, is an absolute knockout. No, seriously, she was knocked out on stage during a performance in Sydney last year when a haze machine went rogue and she slipped on a splotch of oily fluid. The name of the ambulance driver who turned up at the theatre? Lucky.
“They got a real show that night,” says Norvill, who plays all 26 characters — from the libertine Lord Henry Wootton to a fat, old barrister and a farting housekeeper. In one scene, she has dinner with six other versions of herself. The only character she doesn’t inhabit, either live or prerecorded, is the Duchess’s dog. That role went to Williams’ pet pug, Tilly.
In what’s been described as choreographed chaos, all Norvill’s costume changes are done on stage behind artfully placed screens, including the donning and discarding of various wigs, sideburns and moustaches. One night she discovered, too late, that a dresser had put her shoes on the wrong feet. Just watching it sounds exhausting.
“Yeah, it’s really wild,” she tells Canvas on a Zoom call from the Sydney Theatre Company, where the play is about to re-open for a third season following sold-out runs — and five-star reviews — in Melbourne and Adelaide. “The show is a beast! It’s kind of an impossible feat, really, so to attempt it every night is a little bit of a crazy-person activity.
“There’s a gun handler. There’s a forest chase. I don’t leave the stage, ever. And we’re using live technology in a really risky way. I’ll be [livestreaming] an app on my phone and an ad for Bitcoin might suddenly pop up. Things go wrong all the time. But that’s why it’s such a spectacular thing to witness because you never quite know what’s going to happen.”
Pitched as a mirror of our times, the show is both dazzling and debauched, with a playfulness that draws on Norvill’s training with legendary French master clown Philippe Gaulier. Inevitably, critics are drawing comparisons with Cate Blanchett, who first made her name on the stage. Williams, now artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company, has been a long-time collaborator with Norvill since casting her as Shakespeare’s Juliet in 2013. “Certainly Dorian has sold like a Cate show,” he told an Australian journalist last year, “which has been thrilling to see.”
Born in the mid-80s, Norvill (EJ, to her friends) is officially a Gen Xer, often rated the most narcissistic generation of all. That’s a load of bollocks, of course, but university studies have found a positive correlation between narcissism and the use of social media. Norvill asks if I’ve heard about Lensa, an editing app that’s gone viral for a new AI-generated feature that corrects and retouches photos of your face, then creates beautiful, stylised digital portraits.
“I was talking to someone earlier today about body dysmorphia and I’m like, wow, that’s the next level,” she says. “And it’s only going to become more indecipherable between what’s real and what’s human, and what’s technology. I don’t even know where to put that information. And the idea that you lose agency as you get older, and that youth is the only thing worth aspiring to, is so absurd. But we still cling to that, no matter how many generations pass.”
Equally on point is the show’s blurring of gender; most of the characters are male. Interestingly, Norvill found them easier to play. Typically, she says, it’s men who hold the power. Most of the front half of her own career was spent playing ingenues or “concave women” in claustrophobic classical texts as a device to serve the moral awakening of the male protagonist. “There are conversations to be had about why a woman can’t be just as flawed and nuanced as a man.”
![“I’m queer and [director Kip Williams] is queer and a lot of the creative team is queer. So that voice is definitely at the centre.” Photo / Daniel Boud](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/resizer/v2/3RWWKQRYFNCH5HZ2U7VTNRGE3Y.jpg?auth=49b831b7db9a1c5ccce4086f4084fcb68c4d245f417cc26fd1be4a3812302322&width=16&height=11&quality=70&smart=true)
With Dorian Gray, she hopes the audience starts to think beyond gender, anyway, to the humanity of the characters and the morality of their actions. The production has already become somewhat of an icon for the queer community. Norvill, who lip-syncs a musical number, has had passionate conversations with teenagers who see themselves in the show.
“I’m queer and Kip’s queer and a lot of the creative team is queer. Some of the camera crew is queer. So that voice is definitely at the centre of the piece. And of course, Wilde [as a gay man] was terribly persecuted and oppressed.”
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Like Wilde, Norvill has had a taste of what it’s like to be judged in the court of social opinion. When Williams called to offer her the starring role in his new show, she was in self-imposed exile in Tokyo.
Norvill, who vaguely remembered the book from when she was a teenager, managed to find an English-language copy and read it in the Robot Restaurant, a themed cabaret-style cafe in the Shinjuku district. “Actually it was a really wonderful way to be introduced to the story again because I was surrounded by this extremity of capitalism and neon, futuristic urban setting.” Her response was immediate; she was in. The Picture of Dorian Gray’s opening night in November 2020 marked her first return to the Sydney Theatre Company stage since testifying against Oscar-winning actor Geoffrey Rush in his defamation trial against the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
Norvill has drawn a line under that painful chapter and is no longer prepared to discuss it. Played out in the full heat of the #MeToo movement, the case consumed media headlines, but it wasn’t by choice that she was outed so publicly. “My experience was not #MeToo, it was #HerToo,” she told the Guardian last year, describing it as the most isolated period of her life.
In 2015, in what should have been a career highlight, Norvill was cast as Cordelia to Rush’s King Lear. Two years later, the Daily Telegraph ran a story reporting that the Sydney Theatre Company had received a complaint about Rush’s behaviour. Norvill, who’s said she didn’t go to the press, wasn’t named in the article but was called as a key defence witness at the defamation trial.
The verdict went in Rush’s favour and he was awarded A$2.9 million in damages. Outside the court, Norvill said she stood by everything she’d said at trial. A surge of support for her rallied on Twitter, with Australian screenwriter Michelle Law and Sydney’s Darlinghurst Theatre Company among those who tagged their tweets with #IStandwithEJ.
It’s not that Norvill has retreated into silence but that she’s now choosing to speak on her own terms. In 2017, she and fellow actor Sophie Ross founded Safe Theatres Australia in response to what she described as widespread problems of sexual harassment, discrimination and bullying in the theatre sector.
Their advocacy spurred a survey by the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance – the union for performers and other theatre workers – that found 40 per cent of more than 1000 people interviewed had experienced sexual harassment and 14 per cent had been sexually assaulted. Half of the victims had never reported it and many of those who did felt it made the situation even worse.
We talk about the movie She Said, based on the New York Times journalists Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, who exposed sexual abuse allegations against powerful Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein – and the bravery of the women whose testimony made their story possible.
“I haven’t seen it yet, but I will,” she tells Canvas. “It’s important to view all the pieces of art and content being made about the MeToo movement and have many perspectives on what happened at that time. And there’s an immense amount of work constantly happening to keep the movement going.”
Some years ago, she auditioned to play the lead in Blonde, a fictionalised account of the life and career of Marilyn Monroe. Finally released in 2022, with Ana de Armas in the role, the film has polarised opinion, with some considering it exploitative and others as an authentic depiction of trauma. She hasn’t seen that yet, either. Performing in Dorian Gray has been so all-consuming that although she’s worked on other projects between seasons, “I couldn’t tell you what they were.”
The complexity of human nature fascinates Norvill. To be human, she once said, is to be both terrible and hilarious. That’s something she sees reflected in the show, where humour sits alongside devastation.
“Dorian starts off as this uniquely hopeful, buoyant person and then the audience watches him make choices that fill him with a sense of corruption. You watch him fall from his purity into something that is dirty. And there was this amazing discovery when I realised that the audience was extremely titillated by that and almost complicit [in his actions].
“He can do all these horrible things then look at the audience and smile and invite them in. And it is celebrated and hilarious. There’s that kind of juxtaposition with all the characters. There is something excellent in the way you can assume or expect a person is going to be one way and realize they can be completely the opposite. And both are true at the same time.”
“Basil Hallward [the artist] is what I think I am. Lord Henry [who seduces Dorian into a life of pleasure] what the world thinks me. Dorian, what I would like to be …” Oscar Wilde
On stage, Norvill becomes a shapeshifter, losing herself in each part she plays. Wilde, too, came to see himself in the novel’s fractured mirror. She thinks he’d enjoy the show’s take on aestheticism and how we’ve come to see ourselves through the lens of technology – all striving towards something that seems to become more unattainable and less real the closer we get to it.
This will be her first time performing in New Zealand, although she owes her mainstage debut in Australia to a Kiwi; in 2011, Melbourne-based director Simon Phillips cast her as Ophelia in Hamlet.
No dates have yet been set but there are plans to take The Picture of Dorian Gray to New York and London. The prospect is both exhilarating and exhausting for Norvill, who says it’s the most taxing work she’s ever performed, particularly on her vocal cords. “I have to live a weirdly monastic life when I’m doing it.”
A typical day begins with coffee and ends with a tumbler of whiskey. “Then I wake up the next morning and start gearing myself up to do this really demanding and terrifying thing all over again.”
* The Picture of Dorian Gray runs March 18-25 at the Aotea Centre. For the full Auckland Arts Festival programme, see aaf.co.nz