Review: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a gripping Gothic story, the suspense of which was lost in Drama Soc’s production last week.

Credit: Greta Mitchell

The cast worked as an ensemble which lead to a lot of unintelligible whispering and standing on stage obsoletely. Depending whether Jekyll or Hyde was present, performances swapped between the proper, verging on wooden and full of deliberating deliveries, and the manic and ghoulish. The latter was initially confusing and awkward, but became more welcome as the play went on and all the oddly salacious rasping and crawling was gradually clarified as Hyde’s inner demons. Facial expressions at such moments were admittedly pretty impressive.

Frequent line stumbles made it hard to embrace the performance, and the direction often seemed illogical – there were weird accents, people knocked on sheets like doors, soundless clicking summoned characters from other rooms, a confusing, clunky projection typed the words a character was writing when all other letter readings did without, actors were present on stage, being pianos and doors and stuff and making the performance feel more juvenile than UEA’s usual standard.

The richest character was probably Katherine, Jekyll’s sister, who was played by Lu Smith. She gave a strong performance early on and was moved to tears in her final scene as she cradled her brother. This was the most emotive moment of the play. It might have been more powerful had there been a stronger build-up. Sian Duggan played a sweet, likeable, consistent Annie, and Myah Morris-Drake was a welcome, confident presence on stage, well cast as an energetic child.

Where suspense should have been ramped up highest at the end, short scenes were punctuated with set changes and dragged out with wrought speech. This was tiresome and distracted from what could have been a series of compelling, exciting revelations. The final confrontation, where Jekyll/Hyde is turned on, was awkwardly done and invited no investment from the audience.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde lends itself to tension and fear, a murky and enveloping story. This production had glimmers of good, dark atmosphere and successful invention – the use of shadows on a sheet made Jekyll’s first transformation exciting and dynamic – but this was not sustained, meaning the production did not completely satisfy.