The marvel was that having created a fictional character as good-looking, narcissistic and unpleasant as Dorian Gray in 1890, Oscar Wilde could fall in love the very next year with a young man of a precisely similar sort in the comely shape of Magdalen College undergraduate Lord Alfred Douglas. This demonstrates, if nothing else, that to be forewarned is not necessarily to be forearmed. The close parallel between Wilde’s art and life accounts in part for the perennial popularity of his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray — not least as the basis for stage adaptations, of which there have been many, especially in Oxford, which has always held Wilde — a Magdalen man too — in special regard. The latest, from the student company Cut-Out Star Productions, broke new ground in supplying a prominent role for the famous picture itself. Instead of simply mouldering away in an attic, while its subject’s features remained untainted by the touch of time, this portrait took on a life of its own. Stepping from the frame (where he must have endured considerable discomfort standing motionless through the first part of the play), Ziad Samaha, as The Picture, went on to play a significant part in the drama. So, too, did the eight-strong chorus employed by the co-directors and adapters Lucinda Dawkins and Adam Scott Taylor. At times they were used, in classical tradition, to supply commentary on the action and at times to make up the numbers in crowd scenes. These included the curious incorporation into the play of the banquet scene from Macbeth, a re-imagining, one supposed, of the novel’s opium den scene. As Dorian, Jamie MacDonagh nicely conveyed the fatal addiction to dissipation that blighted the life of the handsome young man, with Jordan Waller’s Lord Henry Wotton serving as his witty tutor in debauchery. There was fine work, too, from Henry Faber, as the artist Basil Hallward who lived to rue the creation of his ‘masterpiece’ portrait. Gray’s principal victim, Sybil Vane, was sympathetically portrayed by Nouran Koriem, while Jeremy Neumark Jones seized his moment as her vengeful brother James.