By Meredith Heyman…
Olivier Award-winning designer Marg Horwell is making her Broadway debut with “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” She tells Theater Pizzazz about creating the set and costumes for the famous character, played by “Succession” star Sarah Snook.
TP: How was opening night and making your Broadway Debut with “The Picture of Dorian Gray?”
MH: Making my Broadway debut is something that you always imagine saying, but honestly, never know if you will. It’s such a huge thing, and bringing a show from Australia via London is a long way to come in so many ways. I’m excited to make my debut with this production – it is our ambitious, meticulously compiled collage of a person, and I’m so proud of what we’ve made. Our opening night for “The Picture of Dorian Gray” was fantastic! The audience response was amazing, and the team onstage had a great show. I wore a huge pink dress, which was also very fun.
TP: What was your initial reaction to taking on bringing the character of Dorian Gray to the stage?
MH: As both the Scenic and Costume Designer of the show, I like to start with what the space looks like, how it works, and what the rules are. I wanted to make a space that acknowledged the edges of the theatre and the act of theatre making, and for images to be able to appear and disappear quickly. I knew I wanted characters to appear gradually, starting with just the changing of voice and posture, and then to introduce costume in the video content, then to make those onscreen characters come to life onstage with our dressers and wigs person. It’s like a picture book where you can hear the story and watch as it is illustrated and then coloured in live. By the time we reach the later scenes in the play, the set is stuffed with sickly florals, half flowers/half cheap party junk as the excess Dorian is obsessed with becomes stifling and rotten.
The scenic design follows the progression of the character, and after that, I created the looks of the people who would inhabit it. I designed Dorian as if he were in the center of the frame of every portrait painted.
TP: How did you approach costuming a woman for the role and the many other roles Sarah Snook plays in the production?
MH: A lot of my previous work looks at the combining of period and contemporary fashion and incorporates drag and queer iconography. I’m interested in taking the shapes and spirit of historical clothing and blurring them with the fashion of right now to always be walking a tightrope between old and new. In the late 1800s, when Oscar Wilde wrote the book [The Picture of Dorian Gray], it was a time of great cultural shifts and artistic risk. It was a decade of exploring excess, beauty, and self-expression and challenging the order and morality of Victorian tradition. Thinking about how Wilde would make theatre or art now, it feels perfect to me for a woman to be playing every character in this production, like trying on multiple personas to figure out who you really are. Men’s fashion of that era became very feminine, cinched waists and flared coats, heeled boots, and frothy bows worn at the neck. It is a great era of clothing to adapt for a woman’s body. Women started wearing trousers and neckties and experimenting with how they were viewed in paintings. I looked at a lot of portraits painted by John Singer Sargent, a friend of Wilde’s, I also looked at androgynous fashion worn by Prince, Redcar and Bad Bunny, Tilda Swinton and Annie Lennox.
TP: How did you consider incorporating lighting and video elements into your set and costume design?
MH: This is an unusual production where we need to design all elements very early to film sections of the show that seamlessly match the environment onstage. This means sometimes customising footage for the specifications of the theatres we’re performing in and lighting these scenes as they will appear onstage, but before we’ve seen some of the venues or know what their limitations will be. As Kip Williams (Adapter and Director) was writing the script, we were already designing the production and planning the video and lighting, so the scenic design was constantly feeding into and also reacting to the development in other departments. We used green screen for some scenes, so there is no green in the costume design at all until a scene very late in the show, where no live camera is used, which has a huge impact when you finally see a forest of green. Lighting is built into the set pieces to establish a consistent quality of light between live and recorded content, so each set piece is designed with power and battery sources concealed and with all surfaces rendered so they can be seen close up from every angle. I’m so fortunate in my career to work with truly collaborative and incredibly skilled creatives, and this show was designed with all production elements very much in mind.
TP: Coming off your Olivier Award for “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” are you excited for the upcoming Tony Awards nominations and awards season?
MH: Winning the Olivier Award was so unexpected, and attending the ceremony was like a dream where I got to hang out with people I admire, and everyone was very nice to me! It was so thrilling and humbling to have my work recognised in that way. Being in New York, the thing that is so striking to me is that there are so many theaters and so many artists making work in those theaters and so many people going to see work in those theaters and talking about it afterwards. The sense of community is wonderful, and it’s mind-blowing to be in a city where there is so much appreciation for the thing you do and love doing and spend every waking moment doing. Awards are a strange thing; they’re not the reason you make work, but they’re still so amazing to receive. New York audiences have responded so warmly to Dorian, if the production were recognized with award nominations this season it would be massive! To be on Broadway and to be honored at that level would be truly wild.
Photos: Marc Brenner