THREE STARS

 

The first stage play version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde opened in London in 1888. Days later, the first of five killings by Jack the Ripper became headline news. Journalists were quick to make the connection: “There certainly seems to be a tolerably realistic impersonification of Mr Hyde at large in Whitechapel,” commented the Pall Mall Gazette somewhat drily. Since then, countless adaptations of the original book, a Broadway musical, and an ill-conceived version by Northern Ballet have appeared. From the very start, the same actor has often played both Jekyll and Hyde, to emphasise Stevenson’s central point that one man’s body can contain both good and evil characters. Now Creation Theatre has gone one step further, and cast a single actor to play not only Jekyll and Hyde but all the other characters too. Dispensing with the “Strange Case of” part of the title, Creation is staging Jekyll & Hyde in the subterranean Norrington Room at Blackwell’s. Director and adapter Caroline Devlin has cast much of the limelight on the story’s narrator, Gabriel Utterson, a lawyer described by Stevenson as: “A man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile”. Here he appears to be pernickety, smug, and patronising — very much in the manner of a Sherlock Holmes or a Poirot explaining to his intellectual inferiors how he had, of course, seen through the murderer’s lies many months ago. Jekyll, meanwhile, appears to be a somewhat subsidiary character.

Utterson’s intellectual superiority is emphasised by the fact that the production is set in front of the philosophy bookshelves in the Norrington Room, which was constructed in the 1960s and consequently has zero built-in theatrical atmosphere. There is no set, so it is left to Matt Eaton’s rather sci-fi background soundtrack, and Ashley Bale’s quirky lighting design to try to create the squalor and foul smells that characterised the poorer parts of Victorian London. All feels relentlessly earnest — there is none of the colourful physicality noted by my colleague Chris Gray in his review of the currently touring Newbury Watermill production of the play.

None of this reflects on actor Michael Palmer, whose performance is a tour de force. Armed only with a pair of spectacles and a Victorian cane as props, he works hard to keep all the characters separate. But oh for a bit more of the unrestrained melodrama that accompanies Hyde’s eventual appearance!

 

Blackwell’s, Oxford
Until July 6
Box office: 01865 766266  or creation theatre.co.uk