Familiarity is a double-edged sword, a truth evident in Gary McNair’s ambitious one-person adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s iconic Jekyll & Hyde. The enduring quality and fame of the novel will bring all the patrons to the stalls, but they come knowing the ending. The result is immense pressure placed upon how you tell the story, and in stripping the show back to a single actor, Forbes Masson, McNair, and Director Michael Fentiman, gamble upon an unreliable narrator to shake things up.
Playing the role of Jekyll’s friend and lawyer, Gabriel Utterson, Masson opens the show by promising the audience he is ‘not one of the good guys.’ What follows is an Utterson-eye-view memoir of the strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde which hits Stevenon’s major beats more or less within the compact 70-minute runtime.
Aside from a brief plunge into the dark silence before Hyde’s ‘grotesque’ door in a shadowy London alleyway, however, the play commits the cardinal sin of being rather boring. Masson’s accomplished turn cannot conjure mystery, nor thrills, from a script more interested in his characters’s fallibility than any real or escalating danger presented by Hyde.
It’s not that McNair and Fentiman’s Jekyll & Hyde isn’t an admirable attempt to re-examine a classic tale, or that proceedings aren’t speckled with clever transitions, or character swaps. There’s also plenty of style in Designer Max Jones and Lighting guru Richard Howell’s austerely strip-lighted world of deep, dark shadows. On top of this, Richard Hammerton’s understated but atmospheric sound design is completely apt for a psychological thriller.
“Masson’s accomplished turn cannot conjure mystery, nor thrills, from a script more interested in his characters’s fallibility than any real or escalating danger presented by Hyde.”
W.J.Quinn
However, style and wit are no substitute for narrative tension; indeed there’s more laughter than fear on offer throughout. The final twist, intended to shock, is unearned by the sequence of events which precede it. Again, it’s a clever idea, but far from shocking. Why? Because the plotting does nothing up to that point to make the audience look back and think ‘Ah, of course! How did I miss it?’.
To an audience unfamiliar with the tale, perhaps it will play differently. However, where the National Theatre of Scotland’s outstanding piece of live cinema in 2021 brought me to my feet, this rendition left me flat.
Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh is presenting the Reading Rep Theatre production of Jekyll & Hyde. The production will visit Perth Theatre, Dundee Rep, and the Macrobert Arts Centre after a final performance in Edinburgh on the 27th of January.
Show Details
Venue: Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh – Tour follows.
Dates: Wed 17 – Sat 27 Jan
Showtimes:
- 2:30 pm
- 7:30 pm
Age Recommendation: 12+
Running Time: 75 minutes (no interval)
Accessibility
- Wheelchair Accessible Venue
- Wheelchair Accessible Toilet
- Audio Enhancement System
- Audio-described & captioned performances + touch tours on certain dates.
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An outstanding performance from Forbes Mason.
I was completely captivated.
I’m sorry the reviewer was bored but the performance I attended had an enthusiastic response.
I am always delighted to hear of a patron having a good night at the theatre. Whilst I may disagree as to the merits of the production, I nonetheless wish it healthy audiences and a robust box office.