Jekyll & Hyde

Fresh from a five star, sell-out run at the Edinburgh Fringe, Jonathan Holloway’s Jekyll & Hyde (Flipping the Bird, in association with Red Shift Theatre Company) comes to Southwark Playhouse. This radical retelling for a modern audience, starring Cristina Catalina, fuses live music, black comedy and grotesque cabaret and leaves you feeling titillated, tainted and unclean.

This new twist on a classic tale is anarchic, riotous and sexy. It’s "clever, creepily melodramatic and beautifully realised in a claustrophobic basement with a clever backdrop of seemingly gaslit Victorian shop windows…" (The Times). The synergy of music and text is fundamental to the piece and the live original score by award-winning composer, Laurence Osborn (Tête-à-Tête Opera Company, English National Ballet), creates a dark, dirty atmosphere. After their much-anticipated Pagan Parade at Latitude Festival (The Independent 'One To Watch’), director Jessica Edwards and award-winning designer Joanna Scotcher (2011 WhatsOnStage Best Designer) collaborate to create an eerie and magical set which transports us from the world of St John's living room to the living, breathing underbelly of the city. Every moment is accentuated to great ambient effect.

We begin as a curious manuscript of obscure origin changes hands. It tells the tale of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a strange story of desire, destruction and dastardly experimentation. Worsfield, a back-room book dealer, is swiftly entranced and, flagrantly ignoring the horrors within, he is compelled to read to the end. Through this frame, we find ourselves in the company of two drunken friends - Henry Utterson, an upstanding lawyer, and Lawrence Enfield, a decadent man about town. The pair stumble into the house of suspected murderer Hyde but flee terrified when threatened by a fearful voice. Their curiosity is piqued when they discover a connection between this alleged murderer and the respectable yet mysterious, Dr Jekyll.

Utterson meets the elusive doctor – who is not at all as he expected. As their alliance progresses, he becomes increasingly entangled in Jekyll’s dangerous involvement with blackmail, murder and transformative medication. The narrative follows their relationship from innocent beginnings and dark pleasures to the dire consequences of Jekyll’s research and ultimate downfall.

This Faustian tale of desire and desperation is catapulted into the 21st century - posing questions about gender and identity but maintaining its creepily melodramatic aesthetic. While the original novella and Victorian society were both dominated by men, Holloway asks us if those values are still as relevant today.