Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (NHB Modern Plays) E-Book

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 120

Beschreibung

A superb adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's famous story of the unassuming Dr Jekyll and his dark alter-ego Mr Hyde.This version, first performed at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1996, is a revised and partially re-written version of the adaptation premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican Theatre, London, in 1991.'a single actor tackles both roles... His transformation from mild-mannered, myopic doctor to the fiendish Mr Hyde is merely the physical manifestation of the divisions within the Victorian psyche. This thoughtful show goes far beyond melodrama' - Guardian'urgent, superbly wrought and well-structured' - Observer'Both a theatrical feast and an intellectual challenge' - Sunday Times

Leseprobe

David Edgar

DR JEKYLLAND MR HYDE

a new verion of the novel by

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Original Production

Epigraph

Dedication

Introduction

Characters

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

David Edgar’s adaptation of Stevenson’s novel, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, was first staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican Theatre, London, on 21 November 1991. Press night was 27 November. The cast, in order of appearance, was:

GABRIEL JOHN UTTERSON, a lawyer

Oliver Ford Davies

RICHARD ENFIELD

Michael Bott

KATHERINE URQUART, Jekyll’s sister

Pippa Guard

LUCY,

}her children

Ellie Beaven/Lilly Gallafent

CHARLES,

Robert Jones/Mark Turnley

ANNIE LODER, her maid

Katrina Levon

DR HENRY JEKYLL, FRS

Roger Allam

POOLE, his butler

John Bott

DR HASTIE LANYON

Alec Linstead

MR HYDE

Simon Russell Beale

A MAID

Lucy Slater

SIR DANVERS CAREW, MP

Leonard Kavanagh

A PARSON

John Hodgkinson

RAILWAY GUARD

Troy Webb

BOATMEN

Simon ElliottTroy Webb

BOATWOMAN

Corinne Harris

CHILDREN

Natalia CerqueiraKendal Gaw, Kitty Healey,Johannah Playford

Director

Peter Wood

Set Designer

Carl Toms

Costume Designer

Johan Engels

Lighting

David Hersey

Music

Robert Lockhart

This fully revised and partially re-written version, now called Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, was first performed at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre from 28 June 1996. Press night was 2 July. The cast, in order of appearance, was:

GABRIEL JOHN UTTERSON

Paul Webster

RICHARD ENFIELD, PARSON

Paul Connolly

LUCY, MAID, WOMAN on platform

Verity Bray

CHARLES, Lucy’s brother

Christopher Trezise

KATHERINE URQUART, their mother

Francesca Ryan

ANNIE LODER, a parlourmaid

Annie Farr

DR HENRY JEKYLL, EDWARD HYDE

David Schofield

POOLE, Dr Jekyll’s butler

Geoffrey Freshwater

DR LANYON, SIR DANVERS CAREW

Desmond Jordan

Director

Bill Alexander

Designer

Ruari Murchinson

Fight Director

Malcolm Ranson

Lighting

Tim Mitchell

Music

Jonathan Goldstein

Music player by

Simon Murray

Dialect Coach

Jill McCollough

Stage Management

Sally Isern

Lisa Buckley

Jonathan Smith-Howard

‘In 1885 Gilles de Tourette, a pupil of Charcot, described the astonishing syndrome which now bears his name. “Tourette’s syndrome” as it was immediately dubbed, is characterised by an excess of nervous energy, and a great production and extravagance of strange motions and notions: tics, jerks, mannerisms, grimaces, noises, curses, involuntary imitations and compulsions of all sorts, with an odd elfin humour and a tendency to antic and outlandish kinds of play . . . it was clear to Tourette and his peers, that this syndrome was a sort of possession by primitive impulses and urges.’

Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

‘Certain scandals about London which were revealed by the Pall Mall Gazette in 1885 seemed at the time to prove that the attribution of sadism as an English characteristic was by no means merely arbitrary. In its issues of July 6th, 7th, 8th, and 10th, 1885, there was published in this paper a series of articles entitled “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon”, in which were exposed the results of an inquiry into youthful prostitution in London. The moving spirit of this campaign, which was intended to provoke Government measures for the protection of minors, was the journalist W.T. Stead . . . The paragraphs which made the greatest impression were those which dealt with sadism – “Why the cries of the victims are not heard”, and “Strapping girls down”: these paragraphs were considerably abridged when the collected articles were put on sale.’

Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony

In the autumn of 1885 Robert Louis Stevenson was living at Bournemouth, where he dreamt – and then wrote – The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

From Stevenson, to KatherineFrom me, to Kate

Introduction

At the beginning of the 80s, I wrote an extremely long adaptation of a huge early Victorian novel for the Royal Shakespeare Company. There seemed to be a symmetry about the fact that at the end of the 80s I was working on if not a short then at least a reasonably-lengthed version of a novella written towards the end of Victoria’s reign.

The contrast between the two works could not on the surface be more stark. In addition to the fact that Nicholas Nickleby is 850 pages long and Jekyll and Hyde less than 80, the first novel is sprawling, linear, teeming, comic and picaresque, whereas the second is tight, serious, chronologically complex and set in a strangely desolate London, peopled by lonely bachelors proceeding through empty streets at dead of night.

But there are comparisons, parallels and mirrorings. Both novels are illuminated by their full titles (‘The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby’; ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’). Both were written very fast: in Dickens’ case, to satisfy an increasingly insatiable public; in Stevenson’s, to answer the even more pressing demands of his butcher. And both centre on relationships between a whole person and a kind of half-completed double: though Smike is the better part of his cousin Nicholas, while Hyde is Jekyll’s nightmare.

And in retrospect, it can be seen that they both relate to the great central event of 19th-century Britain, which was the seemingly definitive triumph of industrial capitalism between the end of the 1840s (ten years after Nickleby) and the middle 1870s (about a decade before Jekyll). The characteristic of this central period was a seemingly limitless confidence, not just about the powers of men to transform their fortunes through industry, but also about the capacity of sensible people to redress the social problems that those powers had brought into being.

In anticipation of this event, Dickens is expressing fears that the great move from the country to the city was already threatening the social fabric, leaving the newly uprooted urban middle classes (in particular) disoriented and scared; while at the end of the long boom, similar fears are being expressed, but in darker form. The social and financial threats to Mrs Nickleby, Miss la Creevy and the Kenwigs family are real enough, but they are graspable, and responsive to human treatment. The demons that haunt Henry Jekyll are altogether more threatening. They are about a world in which unbelievable riches have failed to answer the most pressing longings of the human heart, and in which men who promised to master everything have found themselves unable to control even their own instincts.

If Nickleby and Jekyll bookend the heroic period of what we think of as high Victorian England, then my two adaptations frame an echoing period of our own history. The RSC’s Nickleby was so successful in 1980 because, a year into Thatcher, our audiences wanted to be assured that there was more to life than money. Jekyll was written in 1885, at a time when a depraved and degenerate urban underclass (then called the Remnant) is thought to be beyond social redemption, when revelations of child prostitution shock the nation, syphilis is feared to be reaching uncontrollable proportions and the homeless are camping out in Trafalgar Square.

Also, Jekyll is written at a time when the approaching end of a century appears to be heralding a period of irretrievable cultural breakdown. Contemporary Britons too feel themselves threatened by a collapse of values, the breakdown of family, the riotous appetites of an underclass and the consequences of uncontrolled international migration, and in consequence seek to secure and buttress the barriers between the genders, the classes and the races. Similarly, the men of Stevenson’s world felt threatened by invasion from the East End, infection by homosexual decadence and contamination by the mulatto masses of the Empire.

It is also the era in which men started to fight back against the New Woman. This is seen most starkly in the extraordinary literary change that occurs with the death of George Eliot in 1880 and the almost immediate substitution of the one-volume, boys’ story for the three-volume family saga that had dominated fiction since Jane Austen. Like the buddy movies of today, the male pairings at the centre of late Victorian thrillers (from Holmes and Watson on) are clearly seeking to escape a usually unmentioned but ever-present threat.

Since 1887, almost all the dramatisations have lopped 20 years off Dr Jekyll’s age and given him a fiancée or a girlfriend (often with a disapproving father for Hyde to murder). I have returned to Stevenson’s original world of crusty, ageing masculinity. But I wanted to show the feminine threat that is implicit in the novel (in which, incidentally, there is no named woman character at all), and the best way of doing both was to give him not a fiancée but a sister, and to make her an example of those very forces that were so alarming men like Henry Jekyll.

In returning to the ambience of the original, I was I suppose engaging in an act of restoration, stripping away the varnish to reveal a great work in its true colours. Certainly this is how I have always seen the adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. I am however less convinced that that was quite what I was doing here. For in adapting something like Jekyll and Hyde one must deal not only with the original, but also with what has been subsequently done to it. I may try to forget Jekyll’s myriad fiancées, but my audiences won’t. I thus found myself adapting not only Stevenson, but also Mansfield (the 1887 play), Mamoulian (the 1931 movie), Fleming (the 1941 Spencer Tracy version) and indeed a clutch of contemporary rereadings, from Valerie Martin’s chilling novel Mary Reilly (since adapted for the screen by Christopher Hampton) via at least one other current British stage version (by Robin Brooks for Empty Space) to – rumour had it – no fewer than three American musicals.

In one crucial respect, however, my adaptation departed from tradition, by separating out the two central characters. In the RSC production of my first version, Roger Allam and Simon Russell Beale brought huge intelligence and attack to playing the two sides of a single personality. But in addition to denying the audience the pleasure of seeing one man turn himself into another before their very eyes, we discovered that the theatre’s remorseless corporeality prevented the audience from making the essential leap of belief. Try as we might to convince them that they were seeing a battle inside a single soul, what was actually in front of them were two men in Victorian clothes having an argument in a laboratory. Accordingly, when Bill Alexander invited me to rework the play for the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, I decided to revert to the more traditional model. It was no surprise to either of us when David Schofield rose magnificently to the challenge.

I have thus been lucky enough to have two goes at one of the great adaptation opportunities (and challenges) of the last hundred years. For the adaptor, the essential difference between Nickleby and Jekyll is that the former is viewed (unjustly) as a minor work and the latter is one of the best known plots (if not texts) of the nineteenth century. But for that very reason it seems worth revisiting. There are, as I’ve argued, particular reasons why Stevenson’s ‘fine bogey tale’ seems to speak particularly to our flawed and fractured times (the idea that letting one’s appetites hang out might be ultimately suicidal would not, I think, have meant much in the mid- 60s). But the main point is that the theatre should be in the business of re-reading not its own past texts but those from other sources – something the cinema has always understood.

Oscar Wilde believed that ‘it is only the unimaginative who ever invent. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything’. I am not entirely convinced of the truth of this in all respects, but it is clearly the adaptor’s creed. And, as it happens, Wilde said it in the early summer of 1885.

David Edgar

Characters

GABRIEL JOHN UTTERSON

RICHARD ENFIELD

LUCY

CHARLES, her brother

KATHERINE URQUART, their mother

ANNIE LODER, a parlourmaid

DR HENRY JEKYLL

POOLE, his butler

DR HASTIE LANYON

MR HYDE

A MAID

SIR DANVERS CAREW MP

A PARSON

A RAILWAYMAN

A WOMAN on the platform

ENFIELD doubles with the PARSON, LANYON doubles with CAREW and the RAILWAYMAN. The MAID and the WOMAN on the platform could double with LUCY. Dr JEKYLL must double with Mr HYDE.

ACT ONE

Scene One

London: a chill and gloomy autumn afternoon. At one side of the stage, GABRIEL JOHN UTTERSON appears; at the other, his cousin RICHARD ENFIELD. UTTERSON is a lawyer in late middle-age, ENFIELD the man of fashion is younger.

ENFIELD. Mr Utterson the lawyer was a man of rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; Cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary . . . and yet somehow lovable.

UTTERSON looks quizzically over to ENFIELD.

He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theatre,

UTTERSON. had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years.

ENFIELD. His friends were those of his own blood or those whom he had known the longest; his affections,

UTTERSON. like ivy,

ENFIELD. were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object.

UTTERSON. Hence, no doubt, the bond that united him to Mr Richard Enfield, his distant kinsman, the well-known man about town.

ENFIELD smiles.

ENFIELD. It was a nut to crack for many, what these two could see in each other or what subject they could find in common. It was reported by those who encountered them on their Sunday walks, that they said nothing, looked singularly dull, and hailed with obvious relief the appearance of a friend. But for all that, the two men put the greatest store by these excursions, and not only set aside occasions of pleasure,

UTTERSON. but even resisted the calls of business,

ENFIELD/UTTERSON. that they might enjoy them uninterrupted.

UTTERSON. It chanced on one of these rambles that their way led them down a dingy by-street in a quiet quarter of London.