An interview with Neil Bartlett on adapting Jekyll and Hyde

First of all, deciding how to do the thing that the book is most famous for – the moment when we see the transformation from one body into another. Stevenson is very very clever about this; he gives Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde two very different bodies, but only provides just enough detail to make you, the reader, do the work of imagining them in your mind.

He never describes faces, for instance – Hyde in particular, people keep on saying that they can’t pin down exactly what he looked like. Then, when the time comes for the big moment – when Dr Lanyon actually sees the transformation from Hyde to Jekyll – again, he gives you an incredible atmosphere, some incredibly suggestive and dramatic sentences – but if you look at this passage closely, you’ll see that he leaves it to your imagination to make the actual pictures. Well… in the theatre, you’re dealing with real bodies; the audience sees everything. So, the first thing I did was decide on the idea of the chorus, so that we would see them transform their bodies, but again, in a very suggestive way.

Then I worked out how we could use costume and physical rhythm to give the actor playing Jekyll and Hyde two very different ways of acting. Then I worked out the detail of the switches from one to the other – how much time they would take, and how we could make them as dramatic as possible.

The second big challenge was how to handle the fact that in the original book there are really no women. There’s the girl who Hyde tramples – she never speaks – and there’s a housemaid or two. I think this is a very deliberate trick or device on Stevenson’s part. He isn’t talking about the double lives of “people”, but very specifically about the double lives of men – about the dark side of male power and privilege.

But… I didn’t want to write a show where the women in the company didn’t get to do anything or say anything…so I decided to give  the task of solving the ‘Case’ (remember the full title: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) to a woman – and to a woman who had every reason to be critical of male power and privilege, because she is working in an all-male profession. This is my character Dr Stevenson. She does what the reader does in the original book; follows the clues until she finally works the solution to the mystery, which is that Jekyll and Hyde aren’t two people, but one.

I think Stevenson meant ‘case’ as in a police investigation – but he also meant ‘case’ as in a medical or psychological case. Police follow clues; doctors interpret symptoms and psychologists use their knowledge of mental health issues to work out what is making someone behave as they do. Dr Stevenson does all three of these things.

How did you decide what to keep, what to cut and what to change in the text?

I read the book with a magic marker in my hand; every time I hit an image or a sentence, or even just a word that I really love – something that jumps out at me then I highlighted it. After doing that about ten times, I started to have a sketch of the story as it would work on stage. Basically, I keep all the really great bits, and then do the weeks of hard work where I hammer out a way of putting them together in a way that the audience can follow.

© Rehearsal Photography by Grant Archer.

From your adaptation, what main themes jump out to an audience?

Stevenson shows us that Jekyll is able to get away with his double life for so long precisely because the society around him never suspects that a man of his power and privilege could be a violent abuser. I think this has really contemporary resonance. How often have we seen that story being acted out in the news over the past few years?!

And …. the really great thing about the story is that we get to go inside Jekyll’s head; we see how he justifies himself, lies to himself, pretends that none of this is really his fault – and most of all, we get to go right inside the way that he actually loves being Mr Hyde – loves the power of being able to get away with being him – and believes that he can both indulge and control him. These are all the classic forms of denial that abusive people in power use to talk away their addictions.

What contemporary parallels do you make in the adaptation?

People often ask me how I “make” contemporary parallels when I am adapting an old book. But I didn’t “make” these parallels – they are right there. He may be dead, but Stevenson, in a way, is a very contemporary writer. I mean, he’s asking the same questions as we ask. And – this is a really important point – he is unafraid of asking us to imagine what it would actually feel like to be Jekyll and Hyde. He asks us to admit that maybe we could all go there…to look at the story from the inside, not to judge it from the outside.

It is so brilliant, I think, that he ends the book with Jekyll’s own voice. That is the climax; we go right inside. Those last two pages shake me every time I read them. Which contemporary men have been in the papers in the last couple of years that you can think of? Who might have written similar stuff in their very private diaries? If only they’d dared to put their most private and dangerous thoughts down on paper?

Did you have a clear performance style in mind when writing the play?

Very much so. When I am working on the script, I have to be able to see the scenes in my head. So, the movement, the set, even the sounds – these were all in my head while I was writing. I wanted the language – the words – to be Stevenson’s, because I think he is such a brilliant writer to sentences, and because I wanted to stay in the gothic world of the original nineteenth century setting.

But I wanted the body language – and the idea that the actors could talk directly to the audience – and the use of microphones and sound – to all be very contemporary. Because I think the novel is both of those things. Yes, it was published in 1886 – but it still really speaks to us. That is why it has never gone out of print since the day it was published.

 

Polly Lister, Tifé Kusoro and Hilary Greatorex in rehearsal © Photography by Grant Archer.

Do you envisage the test changing in rehearsal with the actors, if so, how do you see the rehearsal process influencing he development of the script?

Before rehearsals started, Sarah Brigham and I got a group of actors together and had them read my script out loud to us. This was so that we could hear if there were any bits of the story that didn’t work or were boring or unclear. Then I went away and sorted those things out, by rewriting and cutting some bits.

Other people do this differently, but I believe that is very important to get all the basics of the script right before rehearsal, because in a theatre like Derby, the actors only have four weeks before they get on stage in which to learn their words and do all the work on the movement, and if you start changing the script too much or saying you know what, I’ve got a whole new idea about your character here – well, you drive them crazy, and actually prevent them from getting o with their jobs.

That said, during rehearsals, Sarah will come to me and say can we cut this line, or can we move this line from here to here, or can we add a few words here to make this clearer? All of that always happens. So, small changes yes, big changes no. The biggest discoveries in the rehearsal room are always when you see that because of how a moment works physically on stage, you can cut the lines where a character explains what has just happened or what it means. Actors love those kind of cuts; they love to show, not tell.