Review: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde at His Majesty’s Theatre

Strange Case of Dr Jekkyl and Mr Hyde at His Majesty’s Theatre
Wednesday, February 15, 2023

8/10

Sparkling with ingenuity, Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde captured the heart of the tale in a way hitherto unseen in Western Australia. 

Directed by Kip Williams, the show was a piece of what has been dubbed ‘cine-theatre,’ where actors perform and sets come and go as per conventional theatre, but the audience’s focus is on monitors which portray a combination of these live aspects combined with additional cinematic aspects enabled by the use of a screen.

This style of adaptation twined perfectly with Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novella. The merging of the actors’ on-stage theatrics with their pre-recorded or visually affected selves enhanced the story’s preoccupation with the duality of man, while providing the show with added mystique and a sense of the uncanny.

The production had just the two actors; Matthew Backer as the lawyer Gabriel Utterson, who is driven to find out the truth about his old friend, Dr Jekkyl and the mysterious character Mr Hyde, both of which are played by Ewen Leslie. The actors were both superb, narrating their thoughts in the third-person as they carried out their actions on stage.

The screens used in the production were moved around the stage and placed into a variety of configurations to great effect. In one of the highlights of the play, the monitors aligned diagonally while gently swaying to depict a rather creepy staircase that led into the unknown. Elsewhere, the screens were used to provide insight into the show’s characters such as when close ups of Hyde were stretched over three of the monitors. As Hyde talks, the monitors move and slightly eschew from one another creating a sense of fragmentation and malleableness within his character.

The video footage was in black and white and featured film-noir-esque low-light and shadows that enhanced the mystery and supernatural themes to great effect. Credit must go to the designer Marg Horwell, lighting designer Nick Schlieper and video designer David Bergman for this.

One possible criticism of the show was that the inclusion of the entirety of the novella’s text seemed burdensome. To fit the large amount of dialogue in, the actors’ spoke very quickly and as a result became difficult to follow in the denser of passages and ultimately, did little to enhance the narrative. Given the tremendous visuals and acting present, the dialogue sometimes lagged, despite its impressive delivery from the production’s two actors. 

With a phrase as ubiquitous as Jekkyl and Hyde, this show was always going to be compared to one or the other. And on the night, it was the good, or the Jekkyl, that won out.

MICHAEL HOLLICK