"Jekyll & Hyde" @ Ashland
*Inner Child, Amok*/Play Review:/ “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” /by David Edgar, //Bowmer
Theater//, //Oregon// Shakespeare Festival (OSF), //Ashland//./
More than a century before Viagra, novelist Robert Louis Stevenson
dreamt – literally – of a potion that could restore lost youthful vigor
to middle-aged gaffers. He woke from the nightmare screaming and
straightway sat down to write his “penny-dreadful” classic about a prim,
Victorian medic in thrall to his own brutal Inner Child.
Pretty heady stuff for 1885. But nowadays, when psychotic serial killers
have become daily tabloid fare, we need some new subtexts to spice up
the old story. Playwright David Edgar, a veteran of Britain’s Marxist
“agitprop” theater movement of the 1970s, is happy to oblige. He tricks
out his protagonist with a full-blown Freudian father hang-up and
splices in a couple of extra characters to lend some feminist overtones.
These innovations prove a lot more stage-worthy than they may sound.
Edgar is a past master at using period diction to leaven his
contemporary polemics and deflect any sense of anachronism. In
/“Jekyll,”/ as in his Tony-award-winning /“Nicholas Nickleby,/” he has
his characters recite carefully redacted scene-setting narrative, as
well as dialogue, directly from the Victorian source text. This frankly
synthetic approach helps us accept Edgar’s offering as “theater of
ideas,” rather than more naturalistic action.
Then, too, all elements of the OSF production mesh smoothly to propel
the play inexorably forward, overriding any didactic clunkiness latent
in the script. Director Penny Metropulos paces the action briskly from
one /frisson/ to the next. In this she’s helped by veteran set designer
William Bloodgood, who uses an ingenious system of concentric revolving
stages to smoothly effect rapid-fire scene changes.
But the indisputable mainstay of the production is its star, James
Newsome, in the title role[s]. Past film and stage versions of /“Jekyll
and Hyde”/ have either used two different actors to portray the
schizophrenic protagonist, or else relied heavily on costume and make-up
to differentiate the dual identity.
No such hokey expedients for Newsome. To transit from the dour old
doctor to the dapper young thug and back, all he needs is a few
spasmodic jerks followed by a shockingly complete remake of his entire
muscle tone and vocal timbre. The effect is uncanny, as though we were
eye-witnessing a case of demonic possession.
Not that there’s anything overtly demonic about the Jekyll we first meet
– a kindly bachelor uncle and amiable host. But even in his genteel
London digs, late Victorian social upheavals intrude. Over port and
cigars, the good doctor and his gentleman cronies harrumph (in a
none-too-subtle echo of our own post-9/11 paranoia) about the “shrinking
security” of their bewilderingly mutable new world where “demons lurk
out there in the darkness.”
In other words, he’s a bit of a parlor bore, slightly tedious even to
himself. Everything about him – the crotchety stoop, the wheedling voice
with its tart Scottish brogue, the darting little bespectacled eyes –
bespeaks a sense of mid-life let-down. No wonder, when he discovers an
elixir-of-youth recipe in an old journal he’s inherited from his late
father, he grabs at the chance to reclaim lost vigor.
His experiment seems to pay off as a spry, young alter-ego comes
bursting out of the backroom lab and waltzes the astonished parlor maid
(Laura Morache, one of the spliced-in characters) a couple of whirls
around the drawing room before plunging off into the London fog. But
“Mr. Hyde” turns out to be unpredictably irascible, and his violent
street outbursts spark gossip about the doctor’s mysterious new
confidant. To fend off queries from friends and staff (as well as his
own growing qualms), Jekyll marshals all the instinctive guile of a
confirmed addict.
The seductive power of this addiction only becomes clear to us, though,
when we meet Mr. Hyde face-to-face in a soliloquy. Newsome plays this
tour-de-force scene with an intensity that’s exhausting to watch, much
as you’d wear yourself out trying to track the split-second mood shifts
and sheer physical vitality of a hyperactive three-year-old.
By turns crooning, wheedling, upbraiding or cackling at his own
scatological antics, Hyde is as self-absorbed as any toddler – all the
creepier in the full-grown figure of a caped and frock-coated dandy. In
his pre-moral universe, Hyde simply acts out any passing whim just for
the hell of it. It’s all the same to him – cutting a caper in
mid-stride, raping the parlor maid or clubbing to death a random
passerby in a Victorian precursor to modern-day “road rage.” Whatever he
does, Hyde is merely venting his youthful brio.
As such, he may be monstrous but he’s essentially innocent. Since he
knows no better, he cannot be held responsible for his depredations. The
true villain of the piece, paradoxically, turns out to be the
“respectable” doctor when he decides to renounce his dangerous
alter-ego. Fearful of detection, Jekyll callously cuts off any
connection that might link him to Hyde. He starts with the impregnated
parlor maid, who gets summarily turned out on the street.
But it’s too late for his cynicism to save him. Without even a chemical
trigger anymore, his vicious “baser” nature keeps seeping through the
priggish façade. Unable to suppress Hyde anymore, he winds up burgling
his own lab in search of an antidote.
And here’s where things get a little weird as Edgar falters under the
burden of his own weighty themes. In the lab, Hyde runs into the spurned
parlor maid, who has slunk back to plead mercy from her ex-boss. As soon
as she sees him, she implausibly enough divines the whole schizoid
mystery in an 11^th hour flash.
She even intuits the root cause of the syndrome: Jekyll’s childhood
alienation from his overweening father. Like a seasoned $100/hour
shrink, she coolly regresses him back through these nursery traumas.
Whereupon the doctor (or is it Hyde?) slashes his father’s oil portrait,
quaffs a handy draught of poison and dies in hideous convulsions.
Newsome and Morache struggle bravely to wring pathos out of this
contrived denouement, but it’s a stretch. Nevertheless, in its Ashland
incarnation, Edgar’s play delivers way more than a penny-dreadful’s
worth of dramatic impact and thematic import.
Labels: Reviews
