PRESS
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“If you can see only one new piece this season, make it this perceptoin-altering adaptation, directed by Kip Williams, an Australian megatalent exploring the cutting-edge of onstage video.”
“Kip Williams has revolutionised the stage with his use of cine-theatre.”
“I’m unsure if I will ever see a more perfectly executed use of digital visual art forms on stage. The Picture of Dorian Gray takes the art form to a different level... [it] should be seen as a pinacle of success... a lot of which can be attributed to its director and adapter Kip Williams’ vision for the play.”
“The future of theatre.”
“Kip Williams, the adapter and direcrtor, has devised a vehicle so remarkable for Snook - so dazzlingly, technologically ambitious you’ll think at times you’re gazing into theatre’s future.”
INTERVIEW MAGAZINE, May 2025
VOGUE, April 2025
PLAYBILL, April 2025
“The Picture of Dorian Gray, now running at Broadway’s Music Box Theatre through June 29 after a triumphant West End run, is holding a magnifying glass to Wilde’s tale of morality, indulgence, and the distortion of self. Kip Williams, the director and adaptor behind the production (which transmutes Wilde’s 288-page novel into a two-hour tour-de-force solo performance) first read the novel when he was 15. ‘It and The Importance of Being Earnest ignited within me this conversation around gender and sexuality in Wilde’s work, and how he depicts the performance of identity. I became obsessed with it.’
ABC Radio Interview, July 2024:
Link: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/sydney-mornings/kip-williams-stc/104090510
“It’s Williams’ last year as Artistic Director at STC after eight years in the job and thirteen years since he was made resident director by Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton.
THE STAGE, May 2024
DEADLINE, April 2024:
Link: https://deadline.com/2024/04/kip-williams-caa-1235886087/
DEADLINE, April 2024:
“Cate Blanchett‘s Dirty Films has acquired the film rights to one of the hottest theater shows around: the Sydney Theatre Company’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde classic The Picture Of Dorian Gray, which has recently been lighting up London’s West End. Sarah Snook has garnered raves for her performance in the latest iteration of the show and last Sunday the Succession star scored an Olivier Award for Best Actress.
GUARDIAN PROFILE, Nov 2022:
“Williams has been busy upending just about all expectations an audience may have around what a live theatre production can look like. Starting with an innovative staging of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer in the Sydney Opera House in 2015, Williams has refined and extended the use of live video in theatre, to the point where he is its leading exponent, experimenter and champion.”
THE AUSTRALIAN PROFILE, June 2023:
ALUMNI AWARD WINNERS ANNOUNCED, University of Sydney, Nov 2024:
Link: https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2024/11/01/meet-the-2024-alumni-award-winners.html
“Each year, the University of Sydney celebrates the profound influence of our alumni community has at home and abroad with the Alumni Awards.
THE AUSTRALIAN, August 2023:
“In fact, the 36-year-old NIDA graduate is now seen as the pioneer of convention-busting cine-theatre shows that are reinventing theatre and have played to capacity audiences around the country.”
GUARDIAN ★★★★★
THE AU REVIEW ★★★★★
“Sheer Brilliance... A grand theatrical experience.”
“One of the fastest standing ovations in Adelaide Festival history.”
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD ★★★★★
TIME OUT SYDNEY ★★★★★
"A marvel of technical and human achievement..."
“Kip Williams' production has the goods – compelling, innovative and utterly relevant. It is irresistible”
“This production of Fausto Romitelli’s An Index of Metals is thrilling and visionary, a Gesamtkunstwerk — total work of art — that delivers a knockout punch.”
"The Australian theatrical canon has a new epic."
“This production will make you rethink everything that came before. I can’t think of a recent play I have thought about so much in the days after the curtain came down. That alone is another credit to Williams.”
“Kip Williams’s production of this 20th Century classic shows what a master he is at capturing complexity”
“Electrifying!”
“Mesmerising…Kip Williams’ brooding, sinister Dream is another coup for the STC’s Artistic Director.”
“Kip Williams is a directorial mastermind”
“…We have Weaving, who has found the role of his career. And he has done so with Williams, who should now be confirmed as a major directing talent. Together their vision is often startling but always shows the play full respect. It’s a thrilling combination”
“This is the gritty, post-millennial, rockin’ reboot vision of Romeo And Juliet we had to have”
TIME OUT SYDNEY ★★★★★
"Love and Information is a thoroughly original work and a tour de force of theatrical skill. But – impressed as we are – we leave the theatre not only starstruck by the craft and skill but also moved by the new understanding we have of our own lives"
"A dazzling piece of theatre in honour of one of the masters of contemporary drama. Everyone should see it."
“Williams has established himself as a technological innovator in theatre.”
“If you can see only one new piece this season, make it this perceptoin-altering adaptation, directed by Kip Williams, an Australian megatalent exploring the cutting-edge of onstage video.”
THE NEW YORKER
“Kip Williams has revolutionised the stage with his use of cine-theatre.”
THE GUARDIAN
“I’m unsure if I will ever see a more perfectly executed use of digital visual art forms on stage. The Picture of Dorian Gray takes the art form to a different level... [it] should be seen as a pinacle of success... a lot of which can be attributed to its director and adapter Kip Williams’ vision for the play.”
THE STAGE, (on The Picture of Dorian Gray)
“The future of theatre.”
THE ECONOMIST (on The Picture of Dorian Gray)
“Kip Williams, the adapter and direcrtor, has devised a vehicle so remarkable for Snook - so dazzlingly, technologically ambitious you’ll think at times you’re gazing into theatre’s future.”
THE WASHINGTON POST (on The Picture of Dorian Gray)
INTERVIEW MAGAZINE, May 2025
Kip Williams Tells Rose Byrne How He Pulle Off the Epic Technological Feats of Dorian Gray
Link: https://www.interviewmagazine.com/theater/kip-williams-tells-rose-byrne-how-he-pulled-off-the-epic-technological-feats-of-dorian-gray
“In a crowded Broadway season, one particularly bravura performance has dominated headlines. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, an imaginative and sneakily prescient adaptation of the novel by Oscar Wilde, Sarah Snook of Succession plays 26 different parts, assuming different accents, costumes, and personas with a madcap energy befitting of the book’s greater meditations on youth, beauty, and vanity. The performance is as demanding as any you’ll see on stage, and it works in no small part because of Tony-nominated director Kip Williams, who called on every theatrical trick at his disposal to usher Dorian Gray into the 21st Century. As he told actor and fellow Australian Rose Byrne, “There’s over 300 marks on the stage, over 400 camera edits, Sarah does over 20 costume changes live, and there’s an onstage crew of about 25 people. So it’s like directing an ensemble piece of sorts.” And yet, for all of its technological innovations, the production also hearkens back to theater in its simplest form. “The fuselage of the whole thing,” says Byrne, “is this ancient idea of just telling the story.” Just after both Williams and Snook received Tony nominations for their work, Byrne got on Zoom from Sydney to ask the director about his earliest encounters with Oscar Wilde and the terrors of mass surveillance.”
VOGUE, April 2025
Kip Williams Is A Modern Maestro
Link: https://www.vogue.com.au/culture/features/kip-williams/image-gallery/bc59bd7f9b15a27b26abeafa202717fb
“As the youngest artistic director in Sydney Theatre Company history, Kip Williams revolutionised the Australian theatre landscape with his audacious adaptations of the stage canon. Now, he’s set his sights even bigger.”
PLAYBILL, April 2025
Sarah Snook and Kip Williams Have Created a Picture of Dorian Gray for the Smartphone Age
Link: https://playbill.com/article/sarah-snook-and-kip-williams-have-created-a-the-picture-of-dorian-gray-for-the-smartphone-age
“The Picture of Dorian Gray, now running at Broadway’s Music Box Theatre through June 29 after a triumphant West End run, is holding a magnifying glass to Wilde’s tale of morality, indulgence, and the distortion of self. Kip Williams, the director and adaptor behind the production (which transmutes Wilde’s 288-page novel into a two-hour tour-de-force solo performance) first read the novel when he was 15. ‘It and The Importance of Being Earnest ignited within me this conversation around gender and sexuality in Wilde’s work, and how he depicts the performance of identity. I became obsessed with it.’
Wilde’s work percolated in Williams’ mind for years, through his ascension in Australia’s theatrical scene to become the youngest artistic director in the history of Sydney Theatre Company at barely 30 years of age. As the internet and the increasing presence of social media encroached upon the world, turning everyone around him into potential products to be packaged and sold—it was as if the contents of Dorian Gray were crying out to him from the locked room of his memory, insisting on renewed attention.”
ABC Radio Interview, July 2024:
Kip Williams On Bringing DRACULA To The Stage
Link: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/sydney-mornings/kip-williams-stc/104090510
“It’s Williams’ last year as Artistic Director at STC after eight years in the job and thirteen years since he was made resident director by Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton.
Sarah Macdonald spoke with Williams about his early beginnings on stage at Sydney University, how he plays with the rules of theatre, and why he’s too scared to watch horror films.”
THE STAGE, May 2024
Lights, camera, action: how a video revolution is transforming theatre
Link: https://www.thestage.co.uk/long-reads/lights-camera-action-how-a-video-revolution-is-transforming-theatre
“The Picture of Dorian Gray represents the pinnacle of what can be achieved with technology in theatre today: a complex and precise symphony of writing, direction, performance, sound, lighting and live video, synchronised into a sublime show.”
DEADLINE, April 2024:
West End ‘Dorian Gray’ Director Kip Williams Signs With CAA
Link: https://deadline.com/2024/04/kip-williams-caa-1235886087/
“EXCLUSIVE: CAA has signed Kip Williams, the adapter and director of the buzzy West End production of the Sydney Theatre Company’s The Picture of Dorian Gray starring newly minted Olivier Award winner Sarah Snook.”
DEADLINE, April 2024:
Cate Blanchett’s Dirty Films Acquires Film Rights To Hit Stage Adaptation ‘The Picture Of Dorian Gray’, Whose Current Star Sarah Snook Just Won An Olivier
Link: https://deadline.com/2024/04/cate-blanchett-dirty-films-acquires-film-rights-picture-dorian-gray-sarah-snook-1235888935/
“Cate Blanchett‘s Dirty Films has acquired the film rights to one of the hottest theater shows around: the Sydney Theatre Company’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde classic The Picture Of Dorian Gray, which has recently been lighting up London’s West End. Sarah Snook has garnered raves for her performance in the latest iteration of the show and last Sunday the Succession star scored an Olivier Award for Best Actress.
Dirty Films partner Andrew Upton is working with the show’s mastermind Kip Williams on a treatment based on the technically dazzling one woman show, which sees its protagonist play 26 roles. Oscar winner Blanchett attended the most recent run’s opening night in London earlier this year.”
GUARDIAN PROFILE, Nov 2022:
Is This Australia’s Most Acclaimed Director?
Link: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/nov/12/people-now-trust-that-my-ideas-work-is-this-australias-most-acclaimed-theatre-director
“Williams has been busy upending just about all expectations an audience may have around what a live theatre production can look like. Starting with an innovative staging of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer in the Sydney Opera House in 2015, Williams has refined and extended the use of live video in theatre, to the point where he is its leading exponent, experimenter and champion.”
THE AUSTRALIAN PROFILE, June 2023:
Kip Williams: Master of Illusion
Link: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/wish/interview-with-director-kip-williams/news-story/13c91eaad5f38cbb8cd46f7fcb93f1b1
“Kip Williams is a born theatre animal with big ideas and a taste for Gothic horror. Now the artistic director of STC is taking those grand ideas global.”
ALUMNI AWARD WINNERS ANNOUNCED, University of Sydney, Nov 2024:
Kip Williams, Alumni Award for Cultural Contribution
Link: https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2024/11/01/meet-the-2024-alumni-award-winners.html
“Each year, the University of Sydney celebrates the profound influence of our alumni community has at home and abroad with the Alumni Awards.
The annual Alumni Awards are an opportunity for us to celebrate the strengths of our alumni community. Nominees are judged on their integrity, creativity, determination, leadership, resilience, compassion and achievement. These awards are an opportunity for us to recognise the strengths of our alumni community, acknowledge their career achievements and celebrate their global impact.”
THE AUSTRALIAN, August 2023: