King’s Theatre, Edinburgh
Three stars
The knives are out from the start in this new tour of
David Edgar’s wordy reimagining of Robert Louis Stevenson’s gothic split
personality yarn. That’s the sound of them being sharpened at the start of Kate
Saxon’s production, beneath a low rumble on a bleak looking stage dominated by
a bridge that presumably moves between two worlds. Into this steps Phil Daniels’
Jekyll, an emotionally bunged-up sophisticate with a cut-glass Morningside
twang and a repressed desire to cut loose. Liberation comes indirectly care of
his free-thinking sister Katherine, who gives her already slightly creepy
brother freedom of their dead father’s library, where all manner of
mind-expanding formulae is presumably archived. Cue the unleashing of the
amoral Mr Hyde, who brutalises his way through London before OD’ing on his own
excesses.
Edgar’s 1991 play’s liberal reinterpretation adds a
female presence to the story that goes beyond victimhood. Saxon runs with this
in her Touring Consortium Theatre tour of a show originally seen at the Rose
Theatre, Kingston production. As Katherine, Polly Frame makes the most of an
under-written role, while Grace Hogg-Robinson as beleaguered runaway maid Annie
gets the brunt of the sort of Victorian hypocrisy that Jekyll and Hyde
epitomise. A solitary female singer acts
as a kind of spectral chorus left out in the cold.
If things sag at times, flashes of dark humour remain,
while Daniels gives a nuanced and at times arch performance as Jekyll and Hyde,
originally played by two actors. Here, however, Daniels takes on both men without
recourse to smoky potions, hairy hands or excessive gurning. Instead, he manages
to blur the two faces of thrill-seeking addiction in a way that goes beyond the
binary before its inevitable self-destructive conclusion gets both the better and
worst of him.
ends
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