Jekyll and Hyde (NHB Modern Plays) E-Book

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

A series of random nocturnal assaults in the back streets and alleyways of Victorian London are spreading fear and panic. Meanwhile, the friends of a highly respected doctor are beginning to wonder why he goes missing on exactly the same nights… Neil Bartlett's inventive, brilliantly theatrical adaptation cuts right to the heart of Robert Louis Stevenson's darkly fascinating tale of male violence, guilt and privilege. It premiered at Derby Theatre in 2022, directed by Artistic Director Sarah Brigham, before transferring to Queen's Theatre Hornchurch. Written for an ensemble and with several key roles for women, this adaptation will appeal to any theatre or company looking to thrill their audiences with a bold new take on this classic tale of murder and mayhem.

Leseprobe

Robert Louis Stevenson

JEKYLL AND HYDE

adapted for the stage by

Neil Bartlett

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Introduction by Neil Bartlett

Original Production Details

JEKYLL AND HYDE

Epigraph

A Timeline of the Story

About the Authors

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

IntroductionNeil Bartlett

A Synopsis of the Story

It is 1886. A female doctor opens the show by recalling that when she was a newly qualified member of staff in a London hospital she found herself presented with a horrendous case of assault on a teenage girl. In trying to establish the identity of the girl’s assailant, this pioneering doctor found herself drawn into a dark story of male violence and privilege. Undeterred, she tracked the culprit down – and found him lurking right in the heart of the same conservative male Establishment which ran the hospital where she had just started working. By confronting this horror – a horror made darker by the fact that the assailant turned out to be a doctor himself, with all sorts of personal and professional glamour attached to his name – she finally found the nerve required to fully commit herself to her chosen profession.

The Telling of the Story

The synopsis above may surprise you if you were expecting a ‘straight’ adaptation of this world-famous Gothic masterpiece. After all, one of the most disturbing things about Robert Louis Stevenson’s original novel is that it is set in an all-male world; there are no female characters at all apart from one speechless child and a couple of barely glimpsed servants. The terrifying experiments to which Sigmund Freud’s contemporary, Dr Jekyll, subjects his own privileged, masculine body are some of the nineteenth century’s great explorations of identity; however, while I very much wanted to keep those experiments within a dark and all-male world – to exploit to the full, in other words, the dramatic potential of the creepy gentleman’s club-plus-drugs-and-sex feeling of the original novel – I also wanted to throw that world into relief by way of a questioning and resilient female perspective.

I’ve tried to do this first of all by simply making the female characters of the original both real and crucial. The girl who gets assaulted at the very start of the story has become an actual person as opposed to a cipher (albeit a masterfully haunting one; I think the page describing Mr Hyde’s initial attack on her is one of the most unnerving pieces of prose of Stevenson’s entire career). Dr Jekyll’s barely there housemaid, meanwhile, has been promoted to being his housekeeper, and also – as my work on adapting the story has developed – morphed into a hospital matron who now not only takes charge of some very significant sections of the story but also of the space within which that story is told.

Secondly, I have invented a whole new character, Dr Stevenson. Her journey from furious revulsion to appalled fascination with the man who is eventually proved to have assaulted her patient may seem like pure invention on my part; in fact, my use of this invented character as a kind of forensic detective very closely follows the way in which Stevenson himself uses a Russian-doll, story-within-story structure for his novel. The effect of this is to take us inexorably closer to the divided life of his terrifying (anti-)hero – and finally, right inside Jekyll’s diseased and divided mind. And for those of you who doubt that there could actually be a female doctor in a London hospital at the end of the nineteenth century, I would point you to the strange case of the woman who won the gold medal for surgery at the medical school attached to the Royal Free Hospital in London in 1899. Her name? Dr Mabel Geraldine Stevenson. It was seeing this real Dr Stevenson’s name still proudly displayed up on a memorial in one of the hospital’s more out-of-the-way corridors that first triggered the whole idea of this character.

The other big change I’ve made in my theatrical retelling of the story is that I’ve given it a chorus. The male characters in the story not only play their own individual parts, they also act as a single if multi-headed entity. Sometimes, they act en masse in order to both embody and amplify Jekyll’s upper-class masculine entitlement; as he changes into his alter-ego Hyde, they warp and distort with him, becoming an ensemble physicalisation of the gibbering, ape-like energies which are the dark mirror of that entitlement. Again, this apparently bold idea was inspired by the original novel. One of the reasons why this story has never gone out of print, I think – and why people who have never read it or even heard of its author are familiar with its title – is that Stevenson somehow makes us believe that his Dr Jekyll is not merely some random, split-personality psychopath, but that his parallel existence as Mr Hyde tells us something profoundly true about how masculinity functions in our society. In other words, about how we continue to both forbid and permit male bodies to dream of doing their worst.

This idea of all the men in the company working as a chorus also foregrounds the fact that this script was very much written for an ensemble. It requires the actors to deploy lots of physicality, and to take a pitch-black and sometimes ghoulishly comic delight in switching between roles and moods. For everyone in the company, at key moments, there is a direct storytelling connection with the audience; for everyone, there is cut-and-thrust dialogue taken directly from Stevenson’s restless and haunted original. In the great final sequence of the story, when we see Jekyll and Hyde fight to the death for possession of the doctor’s soul, it is the supporting energy of this chorus that gives (I hope) this fatal struggle its necessary scale and impact.

The Setting

Although individual scenes in the story have specific locations, this adaptation presumes that the story is told swiftly, inventively, within a single setting and without any pauses for blacked-out scene changes. Sound and light can be as Gothic, or not, as budget, taste and playing space dictate. I have, after all, seen other scripts of mine done with the full resources of a major London theatre, and then by a handful of actors in a bare upstairs room of a pub. In the end (and the beginning), the only thing that matters in this kind of theatre is the telling of the story.

That said, the implied environment of the script does seem to be medical in some way – perhaps an anatomy theatre or morgue or ward. Whatever decisions any future productions of it take, I think it’s important that the chorus of men can be in some way above and behind the women when they are not in a scene. While I was writing, I found an extraordinary picture of pioneering doctor Elizabeth Garrett Anderson being examined by a Board of Faculty in Paris (it’s on her Wikipedia page, if you want to look it up). It was this picture that inspired the script’s opening image of a bunch of black-suited Victorian gentlemen – a hospital board – looking down on a woman. They are the patriarchy, literally judging an upstart female.

You’ll notice that in the script people often interject that phrase ‘Thank you!’ in order to interrupt, initiate or curtail something. As often as not, this is a call to some implied technician or fiyman for a lighting or sound cue. In other words, the characters are often both in the scene and in a theatre.

The Timing

For all that it is so powerfully interior – as much an investigation of the mind, as well as of the body – The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is also first and foremost a thriller. I would therefore recommend that the first half should have a pacey running time of just over an hour, and the second half of a good bit under. As the for operation of time in the story itself – i.e. of the gaps between Mr Hyde’s various crimes – I have condensed the events of the original novel quite a bit. For those of you who want to compare my sequence of events with Stevenson’s original, I’ve included a timeline as an appendix after the script itself.

The Singing

From the idea of having a chorus who whisper, gibber, groan and sometimes speak in full choric unison, it was a short leap to the idea that they might sometimes sing. To that end, I’ve given Mr Hyde a music-hall song as a theme tune – ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner’ by Hubert Gregg – to be whistled or muttered or quoted by his supporters as his leitmotif. I’ve also suggested underscoring certain sequences with the gentlemen of the chorus singing a particularly bloodthirsty hymn. After all, Stevenson never fully left behind either the imagery or the scars of his Christian upbringing, and they underwrite every detail of this story of his in particular.

As for the rest of the sound-world, my playlist while writing included a lot of Siouxsie Sioux and a fair bit of Bauhaus. British Goth music – and some of its early infiuences, especially in the world of radical electronica – seems to me a good contemporary match for Stevenson’s imagination. It also helped remind me that he was writing a dark, dodgy and highly experimental work of modern popular fiction, not a literary ‘classic’.

The Tricks and Transformations

An audience comes to this story expecting transformations. So, how are they to be done?

Again, I am happy to leave all answers to that question to future actors and directors – but as you’ll see, the script does contain some built-in suggestions.

Basically, the changes are all done with, through or behind or a door. In the story, the two symbolically contrasting doors of Jekyll’s London house are so strongly evoked that they are almost characters. One is shabby, stained and ‘queer’; this is the back door which is used exclusively by Mr Hyde. The other is shiny, respectable – as befits its being in a very expensive neighbourhood – and is used only by Dr Jekyll and his society dinner guests. The trick, of course, is that they both give access to the same address (this is a feature, by the way, that Stevenson borrowed from his own boyhood home in Edinburgh). I’ve simply suggested that the two doors should be literally back to back – that one be the reverse of the other.

Also in my mind while writing this adaptation has been the idea of a magician’s cabinet – one of those big boxes with doors that get wheeled on, spun round to show you there’s nothing round the back or inside – from which people can be made to appear, disappear, and even transform. For this image, I was inspired by the famous quote from Stevenson where he describes how the story first came to him in a nightmare: ‘All I first dreamed about Dr Jekyll’ – he says – ‘was that a man was being pressed into a cabinet, when he swallowed a drug and changed into another being…’

The trickery involved in doing the transformations in the way I suggest is actually quite simple: all that is required is the use of doubling and a spot of misdirection – while one of the company slips offstage – and a clear use of costume changes. But it should add a lot of tension – and pleasure – to the staging.

Eventually, of course, the audience must be tricked into believing that they see Jekyll turn into Hyde before their very eyes. For that (as you’ll see) I suggest using the chorus. In other words, to have them embody and multiply Dr Jekyll’s famous two-bodied-ness. This should give plenty of sinister spectacle – and also communicate this story’s most fundamental idea, namely the one that ‘doubleness’ might be lurking inside anyone’s body. To this end, the physical work of the ensemble will be crucial to the playing of the script – and to making the audience believe that they really see Jekyll turn into Hyde and back again, without any cinematic trickery involved.

The Characters

These notes are based on the assumption that the script is played by an ensemble of nine. Of course, it could be played by more than nine actors – and I’d love to see someone do it with fewer.

Dr Stevenson

Stevenson is a newly qualified doctor, recently admitted to a previously all-male profession. She’s (fairly) young, and tough – but it is also really important that she’s inexperienced. Every man she meets is her superior, and every doctor she meets could get her sacked. At key moments, she is dangerously attracted to the glamorous and controversial Dr Jekyll. She is intimidated by him – and also finally pushed beyond her fears into anger and action.

The Girl

Mr Hyde’s first victim in the novel is a young (seven or eight years old) working-class girl who appears on page three… and then promptly disappears on the same page. Shockingly – and brilliantly, from the point of view of accurately portraying male violence – Stevenson’s original narrative treats this girl exactly as Hyde treats her: as an accident with no consequences. As you’ll see, I’ve given her a voice, and made the violence against her the real starting point of the story. Finding out who assaulted this girl – and by implication wanting to identify the culprit in order to prevent further attacks – is really what drives Dr Stevenson and the Matron (see below) on in their search for the truth.

In this version of the story, the girl is slightly older. Picking up on the weird salaciousness of the way Hyde assaults her in the original, I have made her an underage (by our standards) casual sex-worker. She is (of course, given her class and era) illiterate – and fearless. Importantly, a street girl like her would never have been in a hospital before. In the script, as you will see, this character has remained nameless. This is not an oversight, but has been done so that any actor who plays her can christen the character themselves, once they have got to know her during rehearsals.

The Hospital Matron

The Matron works in the hospital where Dr Stevenson has just been posted – but is much more experienced. In a practical sense, she runs the ward, and therefore the stage. She would definitely never have worked with a female doctor before – perhaps she needs to be convinced a woman can do it? Professionally, she is as solid as a rock; stern, efficient and robust. The Matron doubles as Mrs Poole in the story. In this embodiment, she shows borderline-unpleasant relish for its bloodiest moment of physical horror. She also needs christening.

So, three strong and remarkable women; now, the six men in the company. I would say that it’s important to notice how each of these men already has a ‘Hyde’ side to their character. None of them is squeaky-clean. If you pay close attention to the story, you will notice that the reason these men fail to catch the criminal in their midst is because they are either consciously or unconsciously on his side.

Mr Enfield

A pompous, middle-aged ‘man about town’ – but with a few dodgy habits beneath his bluster. For instance, what exactly was he doing on the street where he first meets Mr Hyde, at 3 a.m.?

Mr Utterson

A very senior and well-connected lawyer. He was at school and college with Jekyll, and is now his solicitor. He presents himself as leading a life (as he sees it) of iron-willed self-control and propriety. But he lies, often – or at least prevaricates – and deliberately withholds information both from the police and the audience. Crucially, he refuses to believe anything truly dodgy about his old school friend until it is way too late. Offered the chance by the narrative to finally do the right thing, he stays loyal to his class and his gender, and refuses to humiliate himself by publicly admitting that he’s done anything wrong.

Dr Lanyon

An older, conservative doctor. He was also at school with Jekyll, but I reckon a few years above him, as he presents as distinctively old-school. He too suspects the worst – and again, does nothing about it until it’s too late. His refusal to kill Hyde when he has the chance is, I think, paradoxically admirable.

Inspector Newcome

Newcome’s work as a detective is crucially hampered by the simple fact that he completely fails to imagine that the criminal might be from the same class as his informants, and so just assumes that he is looking for a random psychopath.

Mr Guest

A clerk in Dr Utterson’s legal chambers. He seems to love the gruesomeness of murder and crime – and completely fails to see anything dodgy in that fascination, or in the innuendo-laden ‘banter’ he makes of it.