The small square stage looks more fitted up for a standup gig than a production of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 “shilling shocker”: there’s just a microphone, a chair and spotlights. Gary McNair has turned the gothic novel into a one-woman show, rivetingly performed by Audrey Brisson, that is billed as a comic adaptation but the snappy lines never take away from the tale’s dark intrigues.
The innovations in its staging leave us feeling like we are experiencing (rather than merely watching) a well-known narrative in an unfamiliar way. Director Michael Fentiman, who worked with Brisson on Amélie the Musical, brings similar imagination and detail here. Jekyll and Hyde is told like a detective story and a noirish atmosphere is raised through Emily Irish’s lighting design and Richard Hammarton’s sound design that rumbles like an oncoming avalanche. Together, the sound and light seem to lead the storytelling rather than accompany it.
Brisson puts on a bewitching show, playing the narrator, Utterson – a lawyer and friend to Jekyll – as well as the other characters. Dressed in shirt and braces, she sits on the side of the stage, rather like a pugilist, as she begins her investigations into the connection between Jekyll and Hyde, but later prowls, balances on a chair and switches between characters with crisp ease. She, like the show itself, has such a self-assured pacing that stillness, silence and dark snaps become every bit as impactful as their opposite.
Adapting a story variously interpreted as a Christian allegory of good versus evil and a psychoanalytic study of the split self (as well as an anxious parable on the negative capabilities of new science), McNair’s script speaks of demonic forces but feels more secular. This is a world in which Jekyll/Hyde could be a Ripper-like serial killer more than the devil incarnate.
It introduces deeper ethical questions around goodness, friendship and guilt at the opening and picks up on them at the end, more as a punchline than with serious exploration. At 70 minutes, the production does not probe Stevenson’s story too deeply. Its focus is in the retelling and this is where the thrills and spills lie.
At Reading Rep theatre until 29 October.
