The wounds inflicted on the father, brilliantly portrayed in "Last Dance" as a man of intense and irrational defensiveness, leave their scars on the son.

And his narcissistic, paranoid psyche is brilliantly portrayed.

Herod, brilliantly portrayed by Alan Stanford as a flabby epicene in tails and a white silk scarf, might have been Wilde himself in the last stages of decline.

Attached at the lower chest by a thick band of elastic-looking flesh that they flash at audiences with gleeful malevolence, the Howe brothers are brilliantly portrayed by the real-life identical (but not conjoined) twin brothers Harry and Luke Treadaway, who play their own instruments.

Warburg was brilliantly portrayed by José Luis Blondet, a former actor who is Dia's director of education.

The older Jean and Bernard are portrayed brilliantly by Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Lionel Jeffries, she patiently trying to have a good vacation, he sourly determined to ruin everything.

The Sunday Telegraph praised it as a "memorable debut": "the atmosphere of paranoia and paralysing fear is brilliantly portrayed and unremittingly grim".

This is painfully and brilliantly portrayed by Michael Fassbender's character, Brandon, in Shame.

As dramatized from the book by Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard lawyer who defended him and is brilliantly portrayed by Ron Silver, the story is fascinating and still baffling.