As a novel Dorian Gray exists as a glittering surface, with characters forever resetting Wilde’s famous verbal gems. As a play it is certainly wordy: Lord Henry Wotton, the decadent, corrupting dandy, is forever pronouncing paradoxes, and Dorian’s verbal style comes to mimic his as he sinks into moral decrepitude. The script’s concentration on linguistic acrobatics over developing characterization meant a lack of sympathetic figures, but a convincing portrayal of the hollowness of Wilde’s dandy.

James Evans was brilliantly cast as Lord Henry Wotton. Fabulously languid, alluringly dragging on a cigarette and with superbly sardonic eyebrows, he delivered one aphorism after another in drawling, bored tones. Lord Henry, like his witticisms, is all style and little substance when you try to unravel him, and Evans portrayed his ghoulish side. Starting out as an entertaining rake, Wotton’s heartlessless is slowly revealed in his lack of compassion for anything not beautiful.

Sam Curry’s Dorian Gray was petulant and childlike, naively fascinated by Lord Henry’s philosophies of pleasure and unthinkingly cruel to the friends who adore him. This is especially so in the scene in which he breaks off his engagement with the beautiful actress Sybil Vane (Rozzi Nicholson Lailey) when her love of him prevents her from convincingly pretending a passion on the stage.

Next to the flighty and wordy Harry and Dorian, the laconic artist Basil Hallward is subtly played by Jack Mosedale. Mosedale opens out in the second act to fill the role of the righteous wronged friend, becoming the solitary and heartfelt voice of reason when he tells his friends, ‘you cannot mean what you say.’

So much of Wilde’s novel is verbal glitter and symbolism that I was curious how John Osborne’s adaptation of Dorian Gray would work on stage. The key image of the painting that ages and decays in Dorian’s place is never seen - the easel has its back to us throughout the first half. The changes to the painting are not even described until Basil is finally led to it before his death. I missed the novel’s gradual portrayal of Dorian’s disintegration etched in the portrait: the touch of cruelty in his mouth after he rejects Sybil, the cunning look that comes in to his eyes, the spots of blood on his hands after he murders Basil…

The other problem in staging the novel struck me in the party scene at the Duchess’s salon. Where following a single conversation in a novel is natural, watching a crowd of eight mutely listen to two people speaking is less so. The scene was saved by Paul Adeyefa, whose Mr Erskine brought some overlapping dialogue and humour to the conversation. (Adeyefa also shone in his role as Alan, the friend Dorian blackmails into disposing of the corpse of Basil.)

The great innovation of the play is director KT Roberts’ creation of a Chorus. Made up of the characters who flit through Dorian’s life, the Chorus lurks menacingly on a raised platform at the back of the stage beneath the cracked mirrors and billowing drapery of the set. Their darkly lit twist of limbs comes to life for the first time at Dorian’s Faustian claim that he’d give anything to stay young while his portrait ages, and from then on they listen attentively to every word he says.

The Chorus is deft in its portrayal of the passing of time that leaves Dorian unmarked. In a memorable scene they dance round Dorian as he tells of the passing of years, all set to a tango. Henry and Basil glide past with graying temples. The Chorus also deals neatly with the problem of presenting deaths on stage. Sybil Vane is beckoned into their embrace and transformed from a white-dressed girl into a white-masked creature of Dorian’s conscience; Basil Hallward is enfolded and masked when Alan comes to dispose of his body; and Dorian’s own end is a backwards fall into their arms accompanied by their whispering accusations.

Though there are problems in staging a text so reliant on its surface, the chemistry between the actors and the director’s innovations keep it alive - just.