In Sydney Theatre Company Artistic Director and co-CEO Kip Williams’ mixed media adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s zeitgeist infiltrating penny dreadful novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the consciousnesses of Adelaide Festival audiences are flooded with a literary narrative and audio-visual smoke and mirrors; it is a familiar tale told in an excitingly and, perhaps sometimes overwhelmingly unfamiliar way.
Since Louis Stevenson’s immediately successful Gothic novella landed in 1886, the Scottish author’s characters of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde have been popular culture mainstays, fodder for Hollywood blockbusters, West End musicals, graphic novels, and the inspiration for Marvel comic characters such as The Incredible Hulk. The battle for supremacy between the good doctor and his depraved nocturnal alter-ego has most commonly been characterised as a duality fable: public versus private self, id versus ego, sober versus inebriated.
In his latest adaptation, following his acclaimed take on Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Grey, Kip Williams submits that a strict demarcation between good and evil, a rigid and unyielding duality is either a lazy simplification or, perhaps, an inevitable consequence of puritan eras, like the Victorian, where the slightest departure from the strictures of public propriety could spell irreversible ruin. Parallels could perhaps be drawn to the social media age, where influencers carefully craft their brand, where toxic positivity is lauded, and where an ill-worded tweet could attract the ire of the mob. An environment where the shadows that lurk within the souls and psyches of every human cannot be examined but, rather, must be repressed, will lead to a darkening, to an extremism; the acknowledgement and embrace of our myriad parts, both dark and light, can facilitate an interplay between our best, worst, and all that lies in-between and, as a consequence, ideally an ascent towards the light.
While Williams disputes the work’s strict dualistic interpretations, his production is laden with dualism: two cast members, Matthew Backer (as Hyde’s lawyer friend Gabriel Utterson) and Ewen Leslie (Jekyll/Hyde) utilise stunningly efficient quick changes of wigs and costume to play the entire cast of characters, all while fusing live performance with pre and live filmed video. It is an Olympic acting masterclass by Backer and Leslie, as they not only reproduce reams of Stevenson narrative and dialogue in an array of accents, but they must also emote and express while under the close-up glare of a battery of on-stage cameras. For almost two hours, there is no time for either actor to breathe, nowhere to hide, as their performances are projected in mostly black and white, firstly upon a single square screen, which then splinters and glides into dizzying diversity of formations.
In perhaps a nod to Brecht, it is rarely possible for audiences to entirely forget that they are watching a play, as the two lead actors co-inhabit the stage with a small army of Steadicam camera operators, who are stars in their own right. As the narrative progresses, though, and perhaps mirroring Jekyll’s permanent transformation into Hyde, the divide between the screens and the performers is broken down, culminating in a raw and poignant final scene of intimate human connection.
Williams, alongside Designer Marg Williams, Lighting Designer Nick Schlieper and Video Designer David Bergman, and with the aide of Clemence Williams’ Hitchcock inspired score and Lauren A. Proietti’s wigs and make up, create a theatrical experience that is awe-inspiring in its scope and ambition. One criticism, potentially, is the extent to which chunks of Louis Stevenson’s often densely descriptive and philosophical text were lifted from their literary context, then deposited on the stage; there is a limit to the quantity of visual and auditory stimulus that can be digested simultaneously. Given that the production so impressively recreates the sights and sounds of Victorian London, potentially some of Louis Stevenson’s vivid descriptions of the lamp lit streets or Jekyll’s hunched form could have been sliced from the text; it wasn’t necessary to receive this information from both barrels. On the other hand, given the familiarity that most audiences will already have for the tale of Jekyll and Hyde, less mental energy needs to be expended on assessing who the characters are and where their story leads, which makes space for the revelling in the visual feast and virtuoso performances.
Such a visionary adaptation well justifies making a trip to see the doctor.
Five stars
Review by James Murphy
No Comments