Beguiling beauty; TheDailyReview DORIAN GRAY Birmingham Hippodrome Until Saturday.

Byline: Alan Poole

A NARCISSISTIC hedonist who graduates from AC/ DC sex addict to serial killer, Dorian Gray is as about as anti a hero as you could hope to find in a B-movie slasherfest, let alone a ballet.

But Matthew Bourne, the choreographer who so memorably reinvented Swan Lake, has reimagined Oscar Wilde's Gothic fantasy as a graphic fable on skin-deep 21st century celebrity.

And while his Dorian is scarcely a sympathetic character, he is cast from the same beguiling mould as Patricia Highsmith's psychopathic charmer Tom Ripley.

A beautiful nobody, handed his passport to the world of decadent delights as the personification of new fragrance Immortal, Dorian over-reacts spectacularly when he realises that his A-List status, like his looks, is all-too transitory.

And although there is no decaying portrait in the attic in this version, his moral disintegration is reflected in a series of memento mori - a peeling billboard, a crystal-skull mirror ball - while he is haunted by a doppelganger that doubles as his airbrushed soul and his replacement in waiting.

The homoerotic themes coded in Wilde's tale are ripped out of the closet with some startlingly explicit and impressively athletic duets - notably the captivating scene in which Dorian (Richard Winsor) is first seduced by photographer to the stars Basil Hallward (Jason Piper).

But Bourne provides Michela Meazza with a powerful female lead by gender-bending the predatory Lord Henry Wotton into Lady H, a vampiric variation on Meryl Streep's fashion-mag bitch in The Devil Wears Prada.

Although there are snippets of comic relief (a Jonathan Ross pastiche, a five-in-a-bed conjuring trick) this is a relentlessly dark, occasionally shocking parable, but it is a testimony to Bourne's genius that he has made it so devilishly compelling.

Alan Poole

CAPTION(S):

CAPTIVATING ... Richard Winsor in the tile role of Dorian Gray.