This production is a glorious, spine-tingling experience – and it’s a genuine one-off. You’ll never see it anywhere else. It is knitted into the fabric of the Pitt Rivers Museum as tightly as Jekyll himself is bound to his alter ego.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s original novella came out in 1884. In that very same year the Pitt Rivers was founded. It took 138 years for these twins to discover each other, but after seeing this production, it feels like they’ve never been apart.
The Gothic horror of Jekyll and Hyde fits perfectly with the knotty Victorian curiosities on display in the original 19th-Century cases of the museum: Jekyll’s laboratory is surrounded by antique masks; Hyde howls in agony in front of a case labelled ‘Roaring Bullwhips’; the audience members, filtering through the defiles and around the displays, peek at scenes of human dissection across displays of teeth and bones.
The Pitt Rivers has never been used for a theatrical production before, and Jekyll and Hyde only came about because its producer happens to know the museum’s general manager. As they confess in the programme, normally you would have a play in mind and then find your venue. Not this time! The company thought long and hard about the ideal story to fit this unique space. They settled on a perfect fit.
It's a promenade production, so the audience follows the action around the museum, and it genuinely feels like we’re creeping down dark, narrow London streets, following a glimmering light in an upper window, hearing distant cries of pain and anger. And even the movement between scenes is done with wit and bravado. At one point Dr Lanyon announces, as if writing his diary, that he decided to walk home but had a strange feeling that he was being followed, with a slight nod to the onlookers, implicitly inviting us to go with him.
As if the venue wasn’t enough to make this production memorable, it has another creative trick up its sleeve, and that is the way it reimagines and reinterprets the story. Stevenson’s original is a primal scream about the duality of man. In dividing Jekyll into his outer, conformist self and his inner, unfettered spirit, it anticipates the onset of psychoanalysis, but it does it blind, without terms like id and ego. Food For Thought take this one step further, making it clear that Jekyll and Hyde are one and the same, and that Hyde, far from being a creature of pure evil, is a man whose passions are more honest – and ultimately no less violent – than Jekyll’s. The key innovation is the introduction of a hotel chambermaid, Lucy Jenks. Jekyll is obsessed with her but unable to express his longing. As Hyde he is wild but emotionally honest, and Lucy falls in love with him. So, astonishingly, Hyde (despite his crimes) becomes the most sympathetic character in the play. Ultimately, in his desperation to deny his true desires, it is Jekyll who murders Lucy.
As Hyde, Tom Wilson captures the perfect combination of sadness and ferocity, and Simon Billington as Jekyll has all the pent-up priggishness of the Victorian doctor. Together, they were like the Hulk and Bruce Banner (yet another modern reimagining of the original Jekyll and Hyde). In fact the entire cast were superb, not only in their acting, but also the effortlessness with which they switched from policemen to street urchins to anthropomorphised sexual urges, and in the clarity of their diction, which could so easily have been a nightmare in the echo-y space of the Pitt Rivers. I also loved the fact that they were a combination of students and professional actors – that’s the kind of duality we could do with more of!
I should also mention Sam Morley’s lighting. With only six stage lights in total he managed to illuminate every scene, in every corner of the museum, and he even added atmosphere through subtle touches like turning on the lights in key display cases, or gently up-lighting Jekyll’s glass-encased potions.
After one particularly gruesome killing, a chambermaid says, ‘The good side of me wanted to call the police; the bad side just wanted to watch.’ I think that sums up how the audience felt too, and with that one line, we were all implicated in the crimes of Dr Jekyll.