Though undoubtedly an astonishing achievement, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde leaves David Zampatti a little bemused.
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Sydney Theatre Company
His Majesty’s Theatre, 11 February 2023
Whatever else you might think of Sydney Theatre Company’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the centrepiece of this year’s Perth Festival theatre program is quite an achievement.
Sydney Theatre Company’s artistic director Kip Williams has adapted Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella and given it an astonishing multimedia staging in a perfect setting, His Majesty’s Theatre. On the play’s opening night the State Government’s Arts and Culture Trust also took the opportunity to unveil the balconies that complete the grand old theatre’s renovations.
Stevenson’s ghoulish tale of the respected London doctor and the monster he shares his life with is one of the triumvirate of gothic horrors that mortified and titillated the sensibilities of Victorian England in the 19th Century.
Like its peers – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written the year before Queen Victoria’s birth and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in the last years of her life – it frames the century’s fascination with science and its perversion, psychoanalysis, the ego and sexual repression and fantasy, compulsion and obsession, respectability and the wild.
All three have entered the modern lexicon and still lurk in our nightmares.
The story of the popular, esteemed doctor whose experiments on himself unleash a beast who comes to control him needs no repeating here. Williams’s adaptation is so true to Stevenson’s book that it also needs no explanation. I’m tempted, without checking, to say that it is word for every word of the book’s 141 pages.
What Williams has done, though, is throw everything the imagination can conjure, money can buy and technicians can devise at the story which frames and amplifies two tremendous performances: Matthew Backer as the taciturn lawyer Gabriel Utterson and Ewen Leslie as both the good doctor Jekyll and the monstrous Hyde, along with all the other supporting characters.
While they are the only actors on stage, they are not the only performers; they are joined by eight others. What a challenge this herd of cats must have been to muster. There’s stage manager Sarah Smith and her assistants Briana Dunn and Brooke Kiss, the Steadicam camera operators Ben Sheen, Lucy Parakhina, Sam Heesen and focus pullers/Steadicam swings Tahira Donohoe-Bales and Jen Atherton, when they take their bows.
They manipulate and capture the extraordinary images created by designer Marg Horwell, video designer David Bergman and their teams, while the composer Clemence Williams and sound designer Michael Toisuta bathe the work in precise music and effects.
At its most spectacular – the marvellous staircase that reaches into the void as we watch it from all angles, the hallucinatory brilliance of the can-can scene and the projected live images that multiply, break apart and fill the darkness with nightmare – you are left spellbound and gaping.
But.
The relentless avalanche of words, delivered largely at full throttle and the cascade of imagery, almost all in monochromatic close-up, made the play’s 110 minutes seem both nowhere like long enough to give the story room to breathe and, at the same time, far too long to sit through.
I don’t recall ever leaving a theatre feeling quite so thoroughly pummelled.
More than that, Jekyll and Hyde’s quest for effect and sensation sometimes muddies its narrative. When in the original, for example, does Utterson join Jekyll/Hyde in the serum-induced hallucination that delivers the burst of riotous colour in the can-can scene? Is the serum in fact some kind of luscious party drug, unimagined by Stevenson in his novel, with some hairy side-effects? And what sort of message, let alone moral, are we to take from that?
It’s one thing to appreciate the spectacle – as the on-their-feet opening night audience clearly did – but it’s another to be a little bemused by it.
Maybe I’m trying too hard. Or maybe Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is.
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is at His Majesty’s Theatre until 19 February.
Seesaw Magazine publishes reviews, news and features about the WA arts scene.
