4 STARS, October 17 – December 6. The National Youth Theatre’s production of Jekyll and Hyde at the Ambassadors Theatre is a strange case of rumbustious inspiration rather than adaptation
Nobby-Clark
Elizabeth McCafferty / Flossie Hyde
Elizabeth McCafferty
The play opens sensibly enough with a Victorian circus performer wearing a red-and-white striped bathing suit and leather whip around her shoulders while semi-clad men circle around her imitating lions. She tells us how her mother went to Africa and vanished into the savannah never to be seen again.
She is immediately engaged in conversation by an elegant lady in black, the widow of Dr Jekyll, who continuing his scientific experiments has been transformed into Flossie Hyde venturing into London’s underworld. Soon the lady has unbuttoned the front of her skirt and is bantering in a sordid den of fabulous depravity.
You have to love the NYT. They have a licence to experiment in radical and exuberant ways that a regular commercial company would balk at. And they have the human resources, here sixteen apprentices of Thespis. Touches of amateurism can be forgiven such as strained, raised voices instead of the relaxed projection of the professional actor.
Carnivalesque scenes, some very funny, alternate with more serious moments in the life of Harriet Jekyll. She is refused membership of an all-male scientific institute, courted by a detective, and participates in suffragette demonstrations.
So far, so normal. It’s a feminist take. Then we notice a new peculiar element. Ads for all sorts of products are randomly intruding. A young woman of our times climbs onto the stage carrying her laptop and sits tapping into social media. Her pop-up ads are those in the play. It’s psychotic. What’s happening?
Nobby Clark
Let’s step back. Ever since Stevenson wrote his fifty-page story in Bournemouth in 1885 Dr Jekyll’s duality has been variously interpreted as an allegory of man’s inherent savagery under the surface of civilisation, a contrast of imperial glory and cruelty, or irrational violence lurking in the test tubes of idealistic science. Most often the interpretation has been Freudian positing a fraught relationship between wild instincts and the constraints of respectable morality.
Hundreds of adaptations have been based on these polarities, almost all sticking to the established plot. Evan Placey acknowledges departing drastically from the source. His play could have been titled, The Strange Case of Florence Monroe. She is the principal character, an eighteen-year-old of today who writes a blog involving fantasies about the unmentioned women in the original story.
The play becomes a modern police drama when some of her virtual fans believe they are following her instructions in cutting off the penises of Irish doctors for not performing abortions. A dismembered “bobbit” is held aloft greatly amusing the schoolkids in the audience.
Her justification is that the glass ceiling needs to be smashed. She sees herself as a martyr alongside Emmiline Pankhurst. Yet her online desire for violence is hardly different from that of an ISIS blogger. Are we supposed to admire one and not the other? This is perhaps a deliberate confusion of good and evil.
In any case, when autumn evenings are gloomy, here is a lively night of colour and sound, the wayward art of the next generation.
- theambassadorstheatre.co.uk; 020 7395 5405
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