On paper, this looks like a trip back to the same well that gave us Picture of Dorian Grey - a victorian-era short novel about concealed identity, played out on a bare stage with multiple moving screens projecting footage captured by multiple camera people on stage, mixing it live with pre-filmed footage. This time performed by two men rather than one woman, so the stunt is diluted.
Yet it still works and it doesn't feel all that derivative. Part is that Robert Louis Stevensen and Oscar Wilde are very different writers - while the stories were writtien 4 years apart, and both are set in a London full of secrets, hypocracies and death, Wilde is a relentless stlyist, viewing Dorian through an aesthetic lens moer than he's viewed through a moral or emotional one - he's profoundly uninterested in why Dorian's transformation takes place so much as what it allows Dorian to get away with. Stevenson, on the other hand, is best known as an adventure story wroter, and he's ultimately interested in the investigation of the two different personalities of the title and the strange connection between the two of them.
Kip Williams' adaptation keeps the investigative frame around the work (even though the solution to the investigation is probably one of the better-known tropes of literature) with Matthew Backer playing Utterson, the solicitor surprised to hear abotu the abohrrent Hyde and how he seems to have strange connections to his friend Jeckyll. Backer gives this literary device life and intellectual curiosity, obsessed with something he doesn't quite understand up until the point at which it's all spelled out for him and he's left carrying a terrible secret. Ewan Leslie plays pretty much everyone else, whether it be an external narrator figure, various confidantes, victims, or the titluar duo, and gives them all separate life, without ever makign the show look like it's a one-man-show-with-a-bonus-performer. It's a busy show for both leads, without ever quite being the virtuoso performance Erryn-Jean Norvill had for Dorian Gray - the give and take between the two performers is too generous for that.There's a sense of an arc for Utterson as he falls deeper and deeper into his friend's story, obsessed with finding an answer.
This is just as filled with showy effects as Dorian was, but in a different, more gothic way - where Dorian was ornate and rich, this is austere and darkly surreal. It's a play of shadows and creeping dread, and it's gripping for the full 1 hours and 50 minutes. The two actors and the army of crew, cameramen, dressers and props people move around each other in creating stage pictures that support the narrative strongly. It's a show that uses all the most modern bells and whistles to bring out a drama as effective as the melodramas of Henry Irving were in their day - using scale and sensation to capture an audience in its palm and serve them well.
It's a strange case indeed where this doesn't lose by comparison against one of the most celebrated works of the same artistic team - applying its techniques to diferent but equally spectacular ends.
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