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. But it’s not a complete and polished TV programme. All that’s shown is the raw footage which, frankly, might have been sent to the ticket holders by email for them to peruse at their leisure. As this is a solo show, Snook has to impersonate about a dozen male toffs who deliver Wilde’s ripest and most self-indulgent prose in treacly voices. And because Snook plays the narrator as well, there’s no escape from her fruity enunciation.

And she doesn’t just speak the words, she caresses and fondles every syllable with self-conscious reverence. It soon gets tiresome. Imagine Orson Welles declaiming the Pizza Express wine list in the manner of King Lear. Now imagine that lasting two hours. This show is a lightweight pastiche, like a French & Saunders spoof, but it lacks the substance for a whole evening’s entertainment. It lasts 120 minutes. That’s 118 too many.

The venue for Ralph Fiennes’s Macbeth is tucked away in a blasted corner of Docklands, Canada Water, whose centrepiece is an oblong lake the size of a soccer pitch full of green sludge and defecating wildfowl. The theatre, named Dock X, is a large tin barn surrounded by brutalist skyscrapers. Ticket holders are frisked outside the venue and then ushered into a freezing, ill-lit cavern that looks like a death-camp processing centre. Abattoirs are cheerier. The auditorium itself has space for about 1,000 visitors crammed into tight rows of plastic flip-up seats which seem to be designed for children. Anyone taller than 5ft 10 will be uncomfortable. If you’re over 6ft, stay at home. Pray that your immediate neighbours wash. You’ll be close enough to tell.

The production, performed in modern dress, is set in a swish yuppie flat not unlike the apartments near the venue. The show is almost too beautiful for its own good. The witches have immaculate hairdos and stylishly distressed overcoats and they look like undercover tabloid hacks en route to Glastonbury to bed a few rock stars. Lady Macbeth (Indira Varma) wears the alpha-female uniform of plain grey slacks and a natty pullover. She could be Gwyneth Paltrow’s osteopath. At first it’s hard to imagine that she and her affluent husband are a pair of bloodthirsty killers – and yet it works superbly.

Fiennes is excellent. Beyond excellent. He’s mesmerising. He has a slow-burn watchability that emerges from some mysterious inner source. Each step of the brutal story feels as if it’s unfolding in real time, minute by minute, inside this very building. Perhaps that’s why they chose such a godforsaken location. To depress the spirits and stir up thoughts of rage and violence.