THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE

European Arts Company at the Civic Theatre

06.05.10

Frankenstein and Dracula live on in the popular imagination as spoofs, parodies and pantomimes. Character names and key moments survive, the rest changes at the whim of producer and performer.

Jonathan Kemp's playful retelling of Stevenson's story begins with the earliest stage version, by Richard Mansfield. It presents this as the crudest melodrama, and borrows that style for its own travesty, imagining Mansfield confronted by a “real” Jekyll.

The action uses the saloon bar of the Ten Bells, doubtless more at home in more intimate venues, and presses the furniture and properties into service to tell the story – the bottles behind the bar becoming the phials in Jekyll's lab, for instance.

A good notion, but we sometimes wished for a little more magic and a little less frantic manhandling. And was it necessary to adlib introductions each time ?

Entertaining performances from four hardworking actors: Arthur James as a snooty Poole, Richard Latham as the Actor Laddie, Jennifer Bryden as most of the women [not true, incidentally, that there are no women in the original - programme note], and William Hartley very watchable as the nerdy Jekyll and his swaggering alter ego, emerging like the Genie of the Lamp from the blue light and the smoke.

The reworked plot – potency potion, Whitechapel Murders, “Your tom cat is the Beast of Bloomsbury!” - tries anything for a laugh, though there is some authentic sounding dialogue, and, surprisingly, the darker, more philosophical drama re-surfaces effectively in Act Two.

A large part of the audience were students, making notes. I hope they were Theatre Studies – rich pickings in this hit and miss production – rather than English Literature, since what they saw had all the literary integrity of a Two Ronnies sketch …