The Shadow of Dorian Gray

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05vy5ns

This BBC Radio 4 play, broadcast first on Tuesday, the 26th of May, 2015, serves almost as a lost episode of Confessions. Set in 1895, the play is narrated, Confessions style, by John Gray, the historical man said perhaps to have inspired Wilde's Dorian. Wilde has just been sentenced, and Dorian and John is set to meet an old... 'friend', Alan Campbell, at a café. While he waits, surrounded by those whispering souls who know who he is, he is joined in turn by Lord Henry, Andre Raffalovich, and others, nervously reminiscing about the time he was called "Dorian", and anxiously wondering how his talk with dear Alan is going to go...

I can just about hear, in my minds eye, Vlahos playing John/Dorian, and imagine how he'd put his spin on the lines. Where Blake Ritson plays them nervous and anxious, I would suppose Alex would be a bit more languid in his approach, but with a touch of anxiety, like Bagheera before he's escaped from the menagerie; A powerful animal, assured in himself, but still somewhat caged by public society. This would be Dorian pre-Banshee, who still hasn't accepted that he's given up his humanity, and wants to still be apart of the world, and keep some secrets... at least in public anyway...

Incidentally, it also dovetails nicely with various beats in Ghosts of Christmas Past, and doesn't outright contradict anything in This World or One Must Not Look At Mirrors as far as I can tell. Given that we know in the Confessions timeline that Dorian underwent the events which informed the narrative of Wilde's play in 1882, and first met Wilde around the time of the Whitechapel murders, he wouldn't have even been immortal for a full 13 years at this point.

The character presented here is very much one who is the respectable John in public, who cares about his reputation, but Dorian in private, ever the hedonist that inspired the novel. And I think that rather fits in with this time period of the Confessions chronology rather well.

Anyone else get a chance to listen to this? It's rather a pain to track down these days.