Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Thousands have applauded Kip Williams’ cine-theatre version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the STC show is now en route to Broadway and the West End.

With the same creative team, Williams has now adapted and directed this hypnotic film noir telling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s horror story. Again the setting is London in the late 1800’s, a time when new sciences and a fevered Romanticism curdled into these troubled tales of good and evil.

Stevenson’s innocuous storyteller, the lawyer Gabriel Utterson, is on the trail of the links between his respected friend Doctor Jekyll and the monstrous murderer, Mr Hyde.  

London is a key character here, a world of black and white polarities, dim gas lights, back alleys of fog and shadows and doors to dark fears. The more those Victorians celebrated virtue, the more they seemed to perceive a debauched, impassioned alternative inside.

Our eyes follow the live and recorded camera closeups of the actors projected on constantly shifting screens, their faces often split aberrantly across a few of them. Settings of different interiors magically arrive just as the actors and camera operators do. 

Matthew Backer is completely riveting as Utterson, withheld in his world of gentleman bachelors but so empathetic as he narrates this journey. And as Jekyll and Hyde, and most of the other London characters, Ewen Leslie is outstanding with an expert range of faces, voices, wigs and agonies. We don’t see the full hideous Hyde (of Jekyll) until well into the chase.

Another star is the drum beat and tense strings of Clemence Williams’ score, as are the lighting and shadows of Nick Schlieper, and Marg Howell’s design and period costumes. David Bergman’s video design is also centre-stage; his images of climbing steps to the gods is the stuff of dreams.  

Kip Williams gives us one outrageous fantasy of colour, but otherwise this film noir world would make a familiar late-night horror film. Here though, the live theatre experience, as identities split and shift in front of us, revealing our natures, grabs us by the throat.  

For two uninterrupted hours the actors give urgent voice to almost all of Stevenson’s novella. The weight of words grows heavy by the end but the hypnotic pull lasts beyond. 

Martin Portus

Photographer: Daniel Boud