Calling Birmingham Rep’s production of Jekyll & Hyde “bold” doesn’t quite cut it. Far too quaint. Explosive or incendiary is more like it. Performed with fearlessness by the Young Rep company of actors aged 14-18, this feels like a furious, whip-smart and – that rare thing – genuinely dangerous theatrical riposte to the men who have had their hands on the levers of power for far too long.
In Evan Placey’s version, Harriet Jekyll (a commanding Niamh Franklin) takes up the research of her recently deceased scientist husband. Her transformation into Florence Hyde (Sophie Mae Reynolds, owning the stage) allows her to indulge the repressed desires that would be most unbecoming of a respectable Victorian widow.
But this is more than a gender-swapped version of Stevenson’s novella. Anachronisms gradually intrude into 19th-century London. There is a volatility, perhaps even ill-comprehended naivety – a teenager’s imagining of what forbidden adult vices might be like. And then the second act, cleverly and unapologetically, blows it all apart (here, Ella Kirk is excellent).
With echoes of Frank Wedekind, Martin McDonagh and Black Mirror, this is a playful, promiscuous retelling. Directed by Tessa Walker and strikingly designed in hues of orange and black by Cecilia Carey, the cast of 17 rule the stage. Not only through what they do – playing multiple roles, briskly changing scenes, becoming a physical ensemble to signal transformations – but also through what they say. Retributive acts of extreme violence go unpunished. When change is too slow, things must be destroyed so that they can be built anew. The violence seems just and perfectly appropriate.
But then this is the theatre: it’s not real. Nothing is being incited. I wondered if this is one of the few places in our networked age where we can, like Harriet and Florence, play out our most wanton desires – however dangerous – without risk of retribution.
It offers no easy answers. But for even daring to entertain darkly radical remedies for injustice, this is thrilling stuff.
