Storm boy stc7/3/2023 ![]() ![]() How does it feel to be working with the creative team from The Picture of Dorian Gray? We sat down with Composer Clemence Williams to discuss the rich and cinematic score she has created for this spectacular show. ![]() I am also so incredibly thrilled and honoured to be working with performers Matthew Backer and Ewen Leslie again, two phenomenal artists who imbue this work with such humanity and revelation, and whose performances carry within them the many layers of a being that their characters desperately seek to give breath to.Įvery element of a production like Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is the work of a highly talented creative and production team. I am so grateful to Marg Horwell, Nick Schlieper, Clemence Williams, Michael Toisuta, David Bergman, Ian Michael, Sarah Hadley, Susie Henderson, Nigel Poulton, Charmian Gradwell, and all of our production team for collaborating to create this show – I have relished our work together. If it is the moral regulation of a society that deems one thing a monster, it is perhaps in the safety of a friendship that might permit it to be seen otherwise. This production seeks to express them more richly and in ways that perhaps Stevenson could only hint at in his era. These two elements dance like spectres in the background of Stevenson’s novella, but when I came to write the adaptation, they sang out to me like sirens. The second is the human need to find spaces and people with whom we can share our true self, in all its authenticity, complexity and contradiction. The first truth is that even within the most intimate of relationships (platonic or otherwise) there are still parts of ourselves that we keep buried. ![]() Both characters, Jekyll and Utterson, begin as enigmas of sorts but through their friendship we discover two truths. This is in contrast to Utterson’s own restrained and measured character, and sets up a parallel mystery that mirrors the revelations around Jekyll and Hyde. Early in the novella, Stevenson describes Utterson as being “almost” envious of those he observes giving into their desires. In a sense, we’re focussing on the ‘monsters without’, as well as the ‘monster within’, and, specifically, how the latter is shaped and informed by the former.Īnother element of the original text brought to the fore in this adaptation is the friendship between Jekyll and the often-overlooked protagonist of this story: Gabriel Utterson. But I don’t think the narrative is necessarily suggesting these two personae are inherent or inevitable but, rather, the symptom of an individual trying to grapple with the expectations of a moral code that leaves very little room for error and grey areas. In Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde the imposition of these two extremes literally causes Jekyll to compartmentalise himself into two distinct personae. In their championing of such a prescriptive and puritanical idea of ‘virtue’, the Victorians (unwittingly or wittingly) created their own boogeyman – a demimonde of debauchery and depravity that exists behind closed doors and down dingy alleyways, right alongside polite society. In the context of Victorian England, and the Gothic novel in particular, the binary most ripe for exploration and dissection is the split between the public and the private. So, while the Jekyll/Hyde myth has often been deployed as a shorthand for a person with two opposing sides to their identity, this production departs from that conventional reading, and instead explores the multiplicity at the core of the human experience, in turn offering a rebuke to those binaries that are so often used to regulate us and keep us from expressing the and exploring the myriad of impulses that exist authentically within us. Even Stevenson himself, in the latter chapters of the novella, acknowledges that there are more than just two facets to any individual’s nature. The concept of a deep-seated, foundational binary is certainly present in the text, but when I read this book I see the narrative more as a challenge to or troubling of this idea rather than a straightforward acceptance of it. Most conventional readings assert that this is a story of split personalities and of the study of the duality of human nature, the dark and the light. After all, the key elements of this modern myth occupy a prime position in our collective consciousness. I’m sure the majority of you know, on some level, the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, even if you haven’t read Robert Louis Stevenson’s nineteenth century novella. ![]()
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