Sarah Snook, who appeared in Succession, takes centre stage in Kip Williams’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s only novel. The best thing about The Picture of Dorian Gray is the narrative premise: a young aristocrat commissions a portrait of himself and the image grows old while he retains his youthful good looks. It’s a ghost story, really, and Dorian ‘dies’ when the portrait is completed and then haunts his own life as an ageless and untouchable spirit. Wilde used the book as a literary showcase for his aphorisms. On ageing: ‘The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.’

Imagine Orson Welles declaiming the Pizza Express wine list in the manner of King Lear for two hours

But he can’t maintain that level of originality for an entire novel – no one could – and he pads out his yarn with cheap plot-twists borrowed from sensationalist thrillers. The breathless story involves crimes of passion, whirlwind romances with sexy actresses, and nights of debauchery in shady Mayfair clubs. It’s not a serious work and this production embraces its sense of mischief by plonking mobile technology in the Victorian era. When Dorian discovers that his portrait is ageing, he uses artificial filters on his phone to create a fake digital image of perfection. Off-camera, meanwhile, his face is acquiring the pink-grey wrinkles of middle age. Not a bad creative idea. And it’s the best thing in the show.

The performer, Snook, is an energetic and versatile Australian whose English accent is convincing some of the time. Words like ‘mimic’ and ‘unbearable’ retain their jaunty Australian twang. The show uses live cameras on stage, like a lot of West End productions these days, and the play is presented as a dress rehearsal for a TV costume drama. Surrounded by steady-cams, Snook capers around the stage from this scene to the next, changing her wig and her costume, while the cameramen film her performance and relay it to screens at the front of the stage.

So the audience is watching a TV programme instead of a play.