Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Five for One and One for All

Nathan Darrow in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

The Scotsman Robert Louis Stevenson wrote two of the most enchanting children’s adventure novels, Treasure Island and Kidnapped, as well as the ineffable A Child’s Garden of Verses, a collection of sixty-four poems for the young. But his most celebrated literary work is most emphatically not for kids. His 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which a scientist obsessed with the human capacity for holding both good and evil within one personality devises a potion to isolate the two impulses and ends up turning himself into a monster – evil unchecked by restraint – shares with Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, written half a decade later, the distinction of being the quintessential portrait of the repressed Victorian Age. Jekyll and Hyde is, like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a work of conceptual genius framed as a great horror story. And like Frankenstein it’s continued to excite the cultural imagination without interruption since its publication. It’s been filmed repeatedly, notably on three occasions: as a silent picture with John Barrymore in 1920; by Rouben Mamoulian in 1931 with a famous Oscar-winning performance by Fredric March; and in 1941 under Victor Fleming’s direction with Spencer Tracy in his most surprising – and possibly his finest – performance. (The Fleming version is the real gem; it’s one of the best literary adaptations in Hollywood history.) Stevenson’s narrative has generated countless replicas and parodies, the most delightful of which is surely Motor Mania (1950), the Disney cartoon in which Goofy plays the placid pedestrian Mr. Walker and his demonic alter ego Mr. Wheeler, whom Walker morphs into as soon as he gets behind the wheel. At this juncture, sad to say, probably most people know the Stevenson story through the wretched Frank Wildhorn-Leslie Bricusse-Steve Cuden musical.

It’s only to be expected that a contemporary playwright adapting Stevenson’s masterpiece for the stage would want to impose his own reading, and that’s what the prolific Jeffrey Hatcher has done in his version, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, written in 2008 and currently receiving a highly entertaining production at Hartford Stage by the company’s artistic director, Melia Bensussen. Hatcher’s play demands a small ensemble (Hartford Stage employs five) who hover around the leading man cast as Jekyll (here it’s Nathan Darrow), playing all the supporting roles. And most importantly, each of the five gets a turn at playing the slippery Hyde, to underscore the point that each of us has a monster hidden inside. Bensussen has staged the play, on Sara Brown’s handsome double-tiered set, so that one or more of the cast is always on deck, hiding in the shadows. (The extremely effective lighting design is by Evan C. Anderson.) She also makes clever use of the trap door center stage.

Stevenson didn’t include any female characters, but the movies have always added them. All three of the ones mentioned above provide Jekyll with a respectable fiancée (presumably a borrowing from Frankenstein) and the two talkie versions provide Hyde with a female victim named Ivy – a music hall singer who also sells herself to her male patrons in the Mamoulian (played by Miriam Hopkins), a barmaid (Ingrid Bergman) in the Fleming who becomes trapped in an abusive relationship with him, playing the role of a sexual slave. (Hopkins is charming and sexy; Bergman breaks your heart.) In Hatcher’s play she’s Elizabeth Jelkes (Sarah Chalfie), who falls so deeply in love with Hyde that even after she figures out that he’s murdered people, she doesn’t care. But though he beats a man to death with his cane, he never mistreats Elizabeth because Hatcher doesn’t want to make him a misogynist, for shaky thematic reasons that become clear in the second act. In the first act the point seems to be that she’s drawn to him because his sexual charisma is fueled by the darkness inside him.

Hatcher’s real motivation appears to be that, rather than portray Jekyll as a tragic figure because at some point he loses control over Hyde – who appears unbidden rather than at the express invitation of his host (i.e., when Jekyll downs the potion he mixed to draw him forth) – the playwright wants to throw some of the blame for Hyde’s actions onto Jekyll. Act two is a sort of cat and mouse battle between them, where Jekyll is trying to gain power over his creation while Hyde is struggling to stay in the game. Meanwhile what began as a straight shifting of the Hyde character among five actors becomes complicated when Hyde’s lines are echoed by several actors, which seems to suggest suddenly not that we all have two sides but that we all have an entire cast inside us. There are too many ideas; they begin to crash into each other like billiard balls.

But the show is never less than engaging, largely because the actors – Peter Stray, Omar Robinson, Nayib Felix and Jennifer Rae Bareilles – handle their considerable responsibilities with both elegance and skill. I’d single out Chalfie, who makes Elizabeth the most compelling character on the stage, and Darrow, whose portrayal of Jekyll is remarkably intelligent and whose line readings are deft and occasionally quite beautiful. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a promising opening to Hartford Stage’s 2024-2025 season.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.