Strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Robert Lewis Stephenson’s classic novella has been adapted for the stage and screen countless times. It’s a slim volume with a straightforward plot and a knockout punch line – all of which makes it ideal for adaptation. The question is not so much how to do it, as how to do it differently. This must have been uppermost in writer and director Nick Lane’s mind, when he decided to expand on Stephenson’s plot. For the most part the result was a diverting night of gothic horror, albeit with some bold moves away from the source material.

The play opened, as does the book, with Gabriel John Utterson recounting an encounter with a sinister looking man. Zach Lee did a credible job of breathing life into his report direct to the audience, and for a while it looked as if we were getting a somewhat literal transcription of book to stage. This was, however, swiftly followed by a dramatized section that had me scratching my head as action entirely unfamiliar unfolded. It was a pattern that continued throughout the evening, as Lane flip flopped between faithful dramatization and bold reimagining.

One of the key changes to the plot was Jekyll’s motivation. In the novella, he is driven by a queasy desire to distance himself from unstated vices – the consumption of his potion a clear metaphor for uncontrolled addiction. Lane dispensed with this, presenting Jekyll as a misguided, yet brilliant, doctor on the quest for an eternal truth. It was a backstory that made more sense of Blake Kubena bombastic performance. Rather than a repressed Jekyll let loose as Hyde, Kubena’s Jekyll was fairly unhinged from the outset. His broad brush performance (think Matt Berry in the IT Crowd) was highly entertaining, but it made it tricky for him to go up a gear when playing his alter ego.

The character was further humanised by the addition of a love interest played by Paige Round. Lane’s introduction of Eleanor O'Donnell, wife of Hastings Lanyon, as the third point of a love triangle was audacious, to say the least, and went some way to redressing the laddish source material. Eleanor O'Donnell is by no means a token woman – on the contrary she pushes Jekyll on when he falters. Paige Round made the most of this substantial role, and some of the most effective scenes in the play revolve around her relationship with her cuckolded husband Hastings Lanyon. Ashley Sean-Cook was excellent in the role, giving a remarkably restrained performance that nonetheless held the audience’s attention.

All of this was a fascinating shift away from Stephenson’s vision, presenting Jekyll as a mad scientist, rather than a man consumed with reefer madness, but I do wonder if things shifted a little too far. Time and again I was reminded of Victor Frankenstein’s descend into reckless experimentation, a narrative from which Lane seems to have heavily borrowed. Blackeyed Theatre are returning to the Playhouse in a few weeks with an adaptation of Mary Wollstonecraft’s seminal classic, and I can't help wonder if the trajectory of Frankenstein's fall from grace was an unconscious influence here.

Whether it was or not, there was an awful lot of exposition before got to the set piece of the transformation. Then there was more before the cathartic, murderous climax of the first half. This was a pity, as when it came, this was accomplished stagecraft. Hyde slow motion attack on his victim was brilliantly executed, as was Eleanor's chilling complicity in the crime. Her acceptance of Hyde as the sexually charged version of her lover was creepy and unnervingly believable. If only Lane had let his imagination fly at this point we could have seen something truly radical, but the confines of the source material seemed to rein him in, just when I thought we might go somewhere truly intriguing. Instead, the story trundled on, efficiently enough but without the excitement and energy one might have hoped. Too often, we were asked to focus on the invented subplot of the Lanyon's troubled marriage. While these scenes were, ironically, some of the best written, and best acted, of the night, they effectively reduced Jekyll to a bit part player in his own play. It was as if Lane got so caught up in these characters he lost focus on what his audience had turned up for.

I should say there was much to like in this handsomely staged show, and if I am critical of parts its only because it was so frustratingly close to being an imaginative and entertaining evening. It's so often the case that productions that put writing and directing in the same hands lack the necessary perspective on the material, and I wonder if that's what has happened here. There was little wrong with the text, taken line by line, but judicious pruning of extraneous material and a closer focus on the central themes of the play, would have improved the experience immeasurably. Nonetheless, there remained enough good writing, and enough good acting, to look forward to what the company has in store for us next.