Jekyll & Hyde @ Assembly Roxy

Fringe First Award-winning playwright Jonathan Holloway has not given himself an easy task. On top of adapting one of the most well-known and influential stories of all time, he has added a gender change in his retelling of dual personalities in Victorian London.

The story opens with a meeting between a publisher and a collector, who tell the strange case recounted in one of the latter’s rare books he hopes to sell. The pair provide musical accompaniment throughout and playfully interject their thoughts and worries into the narrative. Production-wise, this is a tightly directed show with all the mood and tension necessary for a Penny Dreadful-style tale. The use of lighting is a particular joy, with deviously smirking stage-hands switching slides in the creaky windows as the setting changes. If the play were a silent piece, without its overdone and strangely insulting script, the production would be an atmospheric production worthy of the material.

While the five-strong cast manages to elevate their lines above mediocrity, the central gimmick drags proceedings down dramatically. A female Jekyll could have been an excellent opportunity to explore gender biases and oppression of women in the Victorian age; instead, she is almost entirely defined in terms of sexuality. From her tragic backstory (suggested to be rape) to her sexual manipulation of other characters, one can’t help but feel insulted to see a dynamic and complex pillar of Victorian literature reduced to lazy sex tropes, and to see them applied to the one woman in the play is especially sad. Once the play comes to its anti-climactic ending, the positives of the preceding hour feel somewhat tarnished.

That’s not to say there isn’t much to admire in Jekyll and Hyde, from the able cast to the slick direction, but when the doctor of the title is depicted as spending more time topless than she ever is doing actual science, questions about how the medium treats women are left sadly unanswered.