Sarah Snook's mind is filled to the brim with Wildean wonders as the star of the Kip Williams' The Picture of Dorian Gray, which she displayed to charming effect on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert April 14.
The Emmy winner paid a visit to the long-running show to discuss the pleasures and perils of delivering more than 60,000 words a night in the masterful solo adaptation of Wilde's classic. While the original Wilde text is 82,024 words, Snook is performing a version that elaborates at speed where Wilde instead lingered, speeding up the proceedings to a brisk two hours of theatrical heaven. "If I did the whole novel front to back, it would be 15 hours, and no one wants to see me do that," Snook laughs. "I don't want to see me do that!" (No word on how that extra 22,204 words amounts to 13 extra hours, but we'll let it slide.)
And to be fair, keeping 60,000 words straight in her mind is no easy feat. "Sometimes, when I'm getting a note from the director, I don't know what [Kip's] talking about. I've got to start at the beginning, and go from there. I really would need to think about it to pick up a thread halfway through."
Between the show's West End and now Broadway runs, Snook has remarkably only lost her place once. "At the first preview in London, I completely dried seven lines in... The fortunate thing about this particular show is there are camera people around me all the time, so I stared down the barrel of the lens and went, 'line?' And the person kindly gave me my line. She was so nervous about saying the line too loudly, I couldn't hear her, and again I said 'line?!'. My husband in the audience was shedding his scarf and his jumper: 'Oh my god, she's got 60,000 words left, she can't get to the first one!'
Now, thankfully, with an Olivier under her belt and hundreds of performances, she has it down to a science. The new adaptation of the Oscar Wilde novel of the same name opened at the Music Box Theatre March 27, and will run through June 29.
Visit DorianGrayPlay.com.
