Adelaide Festival. Kip Williams/Sydney Theatre Company. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 4 Mar 2023
If ever a plot could thicken, it is that of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
It is a dense and convoluted plot of switching identities and drugs.
Australian new-age theatre maestro Kip Williams has taken the now classic 19th Century novella and, following the success of his extraordinary one-actor multi-media stage triumph The Picture of Dorian Gray, delivered The Strange Case as a two-actor, mega-crew, multi-screened artwork this critic dubs a stage “techtacular”.
Not only but also, as is the vogue these days, Williams has “reimagined” the intention of the author and reinterpreted the nature, not of Jekyll and Hyde, but of Jekyll/Hyde’s relationship with his/their London-lawyer friend Gabriel Utterson, who is narrator of this wild and wonderful Gothic story. As Williams extrapolates in his excellent, must-read Director’s Notes, there are some important “binaries” inherent in the Stevenson story. And, indeed, Williams works upon them in this eye-popping, eye-rolling contemporary production.
The two actors, Matthew Backer and Ewan Leslie, are consummate professionals with the sort of exquisite voices one relishes hearing in the theatre. Their skills of articulation are sorely but successfully tested by the rapid-fire delivery required to fit the Stevenson text into the constraints of production time. The audience concentrates madly to keep up.
The show is “techtacular” insofar as it is aesthetically and physically multi-layered; the actors visible, working at their craft onstage, while simultaneously live-videoed by black-clad camera operators moving around them. Their video images are delivered to the audience in black and white on a series of screens above the stage, leaving the colours of the tangible world in a muted miniature perspective below. Indeed, it is fascinating to be able to see those two realities: the filmic scene and behind the scene. It surely is wondrously clever theatre, albeit with perhaps too many screens. How did actors down on the stage climb those vivid non-existent stairs? How come there are more faces on the screens than there are on the actors onstage?
Festival audiences are swarming to witness this emergent “techtacular” theatre.
But what of the content and the intent?
Here, the critic must step back into the original intentions of a Victorian author and ponder the old-school known against the newly-assumed possibilities. It is a ripe field.
The director reiterates the word “binary” in his notes - and the Stevenson concept of Jekyll and Hyde as a schizophrenic, two-in-one, personality-disorder phenomenon sings forth as understood Freudian logic.
But, Williams suggests one can be more than two. Human nature is as chaotic as nature itself and, indeed, people keep huge parts of themselves secret. We all have multiple facets.
So it comes that Dr Jeckyll, under the influence of his chemicals, besports in the dark worlds of sleaze and night life deviation, being not the same straight man that his old friend Utterson has assumed.
And thus, with a splendour of artful inventiveness, does Williams take his audience into an otherworld of drug-fuelled psychotic and carnal passions.
From the crimes of evil Hyde, his theatrical imaginings soar to manic triumph and tragedy, all the while, on many screens, described in machine-gun torrents of dialogue by STC’s brilliant actors. Theirs are bravura performances and then some.
From the classic elegance of filmic monochrome, the rising denouement is something akin to an acid trip and the binaries take flight.
The audience either claps or gapes.
At the end of the night, the audience is satisfied that this had been a festival-worthy experience, but its members wander off contemplating where film ends and theatre begins. It is a challenging melange of genres.
Lights, cameras, action, suspense and sophisticated effects.
This show has the lot.
Samela Harris
When: 4 to 12 Mar
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
