It looks beautiful. Steam rises from under the floor grills, Chinese lanterns glow overhead. A cracked door looms ominously in a row of opaque panels that suggest a laboratory; a crimson velvet chaise longue conjures both Victorian respectability and a touch of Dorian Gray-style corruption. Maybe even a splash of blood.
Neil Irish’s design, the lighting, and Jon Nicholls’s sound design are the best things about this collaboration between Hong Kong’s Chung Ying Theatre Company and Red Shift which aims to reinvent Robert Louis Stevenson’s gothic horror story. Our eyes are blinded by dazzling light. Like the lawyer, Utterson, we see what we want to see and what suits us, and fail to see what is happening right in front of us.
Stevenson’s story gets a makeover in the hands of writer and director Jonathan Holloway. There’s an interesting idea at its bloody heart: Jekyll is a female research scientist, fleeing trauma and rape in the Balkans and looking for safety in London through transformation into a man: Hyde. This Hyde may be a survivor but he is the outward manifestation of the hidden brutality and misogyny of the outwardly respectable Victorian gentleman. Utterson is horrified by the thought of Hyde, but maybe that’s because he recognises him in himself.
Sadly it’s rather more interesting in theory than it proves in practice in an unevenly cast production where the Chinese elements don’t always sit as comfortably or naturally as they might well have done in the original Hong Kong staging. Olivia Winteringham struggles, one might say manfully, with the duality of Jekyll and Hyde, at her best rising above the stereotype of mysterious femme fatale. But the evening sinks under the weight of a production that looks stylish but which never settles on a cohesive performance style.
