For almost fifteen minutes, we sit looking at a vertical screen on a seemingly empty stage. In the projection, the Australian actress Sarah Snook, in tight closeup, speaks the rapid, bantering prose of Oscar Wilde’s 1890 masterpiece “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” adapted with pace and invention by the Australian director Kip Williams. Snook makes earnest eye contact with the camera as she tells the story of a Victorian portrait painter, Basil, who is, himself, telling his viperish friend Lord Henry about his latest subject, an exquisitely innocent young man named Dorian Gray. In the course of the play, Snook flies through a dizzying profusion of wig changes and increasingly slippery time jumps to become twenty-six characters from Wilde’s proto-horror novel, in which a young man’s portrait ages and shows the imprint of his sins, while his own lovely face stays youthful forever. How does art stamp a soul, and can a soul stamp itself on art? Perhaps four seasons of playing the morally deteriorating Shiv Roy on “Succession” have made questions like that feel particularly urgent to Snook.

As she plays all the parts, Snook makes introductions within introductions, reflections within reflections, thus creating the Wildean sense of a densely layered mille-feuille. Stage managers and camera-folk hover around her; we see their black-clad forms moving in the margins. Onscreen, dressers are fitting Snook with a golden, candyfloss wig and a billowy white shirt to play Dorian. After those first fifteen minutes, when she comes around the edge of the screen and into full view of the audience, the actor’s relative tininess is a shock: the billboard-size image—vertical as a cellphone—has made her seem so huge and clear and close.

Williams premièred this multimedia “Dorian Gray” in Australia, in 2020, with another actor, Eryn Jean Norvill, but when it went to London, Snook took over the role. Her performance at the West End’s Haymarket Theatre was a splashy success, winning an Olivier Award, and she now brings “Gray” to Broadway. The show is an athletic feat: Snook executes an elaborate, exacting dance, timed to the second so she can interact with her prerecorded selves, and she speaks for two hours, without a break—there are only three moments when she can sneak a sip of water.

Throughout “Dorian Gray,” what we can perceive and what we know to be real are in constant tension. The stage seems thick with phantoms, and so, in a way, does Snook’s career, which has taken her from drama school in Sydney to a film career (she appeared in both “Steve Jobs” and “The Glass Castle”) to the London stage (she played the temptress Hilde Wangel opposite Ralph Fiennes in Ibsen’s “Master Builder” at the Old Vic), and then to her most famous part, her Emmy Award–winning run as Shiv in “Succession.” I met Snook at the Algonquin Hotel—we sat in an empty, slightly desolate event space called the Oak Room, the onetime site of the much-missed supper club where the singer Sylvia Syms collapsed and died right at Cy Coleman’s feet. Snook spoke to me about her other stage work, and about the various forces that brought her to Wilde. (This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)

Your projects have a touch for the Zeitgeist. It can certainly feel like the Presidential candidate Mencken from “Succession” is our current President! This piece comes as we are thinking particularly intensely about image. “The Substance” feels very much like a response to the body horror of Dorian Gray, for instance.

When [Kip and I] first spoke on Zoom, he spoke of the Victorian era as being the first time that the word “individual” really gained prominence. Kip views this heightened narcissism, this heightened sense of the individual, the image-based dandies, all this stuff going on in the Victorian era as a bookend to what’s happening now. Kip read an interview with Oscar, who mentioned that the three main characters of the book—Dorian, Basil, and Lord Henry—are all aspects of himself, that Lord Henry is who society believes he is; Dorian is who he wants to be; and Basil is who he probably really is. Now, we do that naturally with ourselves: we have a version of ourselves on Instagram; a version of ourselves with our family; a version of ourselves with friends in public; a version of ourselves at work. It’s easier to keep those [versions] separate now in a way that it hasn’t been before.

You spend so much time at the beginning of the show unseen, where you’re behind the screen, concealed “behind the curtain” in a kind of “Wizard of Oz” way. Do you feel an energy from an audience when they can see you onscreen, but you yourself are still hidden?

In my first performance [in London], I came out and I sat down, and I was, like, ‘Oh no, the audience can’t see me. I can’t connect to the audience.’ I wanted to peek out from the curtain to reassure them. And then I lost the lines. So the lesson is, don’t apologize for the format of the show. There’s always a connection to me as a performer live onstage, but there are also dramaturgical decisions made to have something between us, to be sometimes inaccessible or roundabout.

In the play, you’re showing us twenty-six characters, and also a gradation of masculinity in the men who make Dorian Gray into Dorian Gray, like Lord Henry. How technical is it, creating the differences between the characters?

Vocal pitch is conscious and different—there’s a different placement in my mouth, so for Basil, it’s very forward on the teeth and down to the right of my mouth; Lord Henry is the lower bass, with more throat resonance, and there’s a languidness to the way he speaks. The narrator is my own voice, and then Dorian is up in a higher head range.

Dorian changes from seeming very young to . . . not. What’s happening there?

That’s the narrator and Dorian coming together, as well as Lord Henry coming into Dorian. It’s also the absorbing of the narrator, as she is being seduced by looking into the mirror and having eternal youth, and then potentially realizing the error of her ways.

So the narrator is . . . you?

She is Oscar. She is the book. She is the audience. She’s me. She is a character having an opinion, having feelings about what is happening.

And you’re working against recorded versions of yourself.

Those are from the end of 2023 when we rehearsed the show in Melbourne.

You’re performing against your younger self?

Yes, but I was also right in the depths of pumping and breastfeeding. I don’t look at that and think, “Oh, you’re my younger self.” Instead, I go, “Whoa. That’s a tired lady dressed as a man with a mustache.”

Onstage, there’s a moment when your live-videoed face goes in and out of distortion, and in and out of a beautification filter. What’s going on in your mind in those moments?

The very strange thing is that when it is beautified, my brain very easily gets used to that and attached to that. And when it goes off, it’s really, “Oh, my God, that’s what I look like?” That edited image is what my brain holds on to. How powerful those technologies are to convince ourselves that we look better like that, or we could be happier like that!

The choreography for what you’re doing onstage is so complex and deliberate. Your process in “Succession” included a lot of improvisation—is there room for that here?

No, but if you put a box or a cage around something, you find a different way to dance inside it. There are three small characters, each with only one line, that I can change every night if I want to. There’s a character in the club scene, who only exists for that moment, and I ask myself, How high is he tonight? What’s he had? So you have to keep within the box. But, in order to keep yourself excited inside that box, you have to find new ways to stretch.

That sense of freedom inside formal precision reminds me of kabuki theatre. Also, in kabuki, there are people onstage with the actor who are sort of “invisible.” For you, are the camerapeople and dressers . . . there?

Yes and no. I noticed in the rehearsal period that if someone asked, “Who changes your shoes?” I couldn’t tell you, I just know that I have them on in the next scene. Lord Henry has a great speech as his costume is being changed, and that feels right for Lord Henry, the entitlement of someone changing him as he continues to have a conversation and is completely unaware that someone has just put on his waistcoat, his jacket, his shoes.