Standing ovations are "ten-a-penny" in the theatre these days, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. "But I've never seen one as swift or unanimous as that which greeted Sarah Snook" at the end of this show. And for once, it "seemed fully justified".
In Kip Williams's stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde's novel, the Australian actress (one of the stars of TV's "Succession") inhabits all 26 characters. Her every move is filmed by an onstage team of camera operators, and we see her in dizzying close-up on an array of screens. She also interacts live with pre-recorded screen versions of herself – as the sinister Lord Henry Wotton, the besotted artist Basil Hallward, the hapless actress Sibyl Vane and so on.
It could all be too tricksy, but the "head-spinning magic is that your disbelief is richly suspended": this is a "chameleonic tour de force" from a performer of "exceptional pluck and mercurial power".
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The technical wizardry serves the drama, rather than distracting from it, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. And Snook's performance is "tinglingly virtuoso". "It is all beautiful, brilliant, maniacally unmissable."
Yet if you look at the ticket prices, you'll find you may have to miss it, said Clive Davis in The Times. Seats in the stalls are £250 or more – a lot for a show that is good but a bit thin, more style than substance. With "Plaza Suite" (starring Sarah Jessica Parker) charging similarly crazy prices, it seems a "kind of designer-label madness has taken root" in the West End.
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