Jekyll and Hyde: The strange case of the hybrid theatre show

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is coming to Leith Theatre

Leith Theatre is a huge, dark and thrilling space, with its fair share of rumoured ghosts; yet in all its 90 years, it can never have hosted an event quite so strange, and hard to categorise, as the version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde that is set to appear there this week. It’s a terrific setting, of course, for Stevenson’s famous and much-adapted 1886 story about a respectable man of science whose life is taken over by an evil and violent other self, Mr Hyde; but this new Jekyll and Hyde – co-produced by the National Theatre of Scotland and film company Selkie Productions – will be both live show and film, a retelling of the story witnessed by a live audience at Leith Theatre, performed in real time, and also recorded “as live” for streaming into cinemas across Scotland next Sunday evening.

To create the show, film sets have been built all over the theatre, creating an office here, a library there. Some outdoor scenes have been pre-filmed in famous settings across Edinburgh; and a top-flight Scottish cast has been recruited, featuring Henry Pettigrew as Jekyll and Lorn Macdonald as his friend Utterson, alongside Tam Dean Burn, David Hayman, Alison Peebles, and half a dozen others. And yet still, no-one knows exactly how this experiment in “hybrid theatre” will work out.

“I’m just looking forward to appearing in something that I can’t actually imagine,” says Henry Pettigrew, who grew up in Edinburgh, and whose career so far has encompassed stage work ranging from the National Theatre of Scotland to Chichester Festival Theatre, and television shows including Guilt, Shetland, Line of Duty, and The Crown. “It’s exciting; and I’m also looking forward to exploring a really dark side of myself.”

“What we won’t know until we get in front of an audience, though, is exactly how this will work in practice. We’re going to have to perform with all the precision of film, hitting our marks exactly and so on, yet do it live in real time, without the luxury of re-takes if anything goes wrong; and if the live audience starts to respond – to laugh, or whatever – well, what will happen then? I can’t wait to find out….”

As director of the show, across both media, Hope Dickson Leach is the woman who is supposed to know the answers to all those questions; but she, too, seems to be enjoying the sense of experiment and uncertainty at the heart of the Jekyll And Hyde project. She fell in love with theatre in the 1990s, as a student at Edinburgh University, and took a while after graduation to realise that film directing was her vocation. She spent five years in New York just after 9/11, studying directing at Columbia University, and making several award-winning films before she returned to the UK, got married, and continued to pursue her passionate interest both in how film relates to theatre and the visual arts.

In 2011, she made a film for the NTS’s Five Minute Theatre series, featuring a performance with a live audience, with the first of her two children – then a tiny baby – strapped to her back “like a parcel”; she also co-founded Raising Films, a groundbreaking organisation for parents and carers in the film industry. And in 2020, she was commissioned by the NTS and Edinburgh International Festival to make her beautiful film Ghost Light, a love letter to live theatre in lockdown, broadcast to the world as part of that year’s virtual festival.

“I think a lot of what’s described as “hybrid” work, post-pandemic, is really just filmed theatre,” says Dickson Leach, “and that can be fantastic. But in this event, it will be more like the live audience watching a film being made around them, the cameras moving, and so on. They’ll be wearing headphones, so that they can hear the sound, wherever the action is; and they’ll be witnessing both the story itself, and the story of how the film is made.”

Despite the formal complexity of the project, though, Dickson Leach is also passionate about the story itself, and its resonances. “Politically, these are such volatile times,” she says, “and there’s a sense of male power, and male edifices and structures, crumbling as they are exposed. That’s why I wanted to emphasise the maleness of Stevenson’s story, and the very masculine world he portrays; this is a brilliant story about men, and why they behave as they do.

“And yes, in adapting the story, the writer Vlad Butucea and I never hesitated to transfer the action to Edinburgh – the London of Stevenson’s story often feels more like Edinburgh anyway. I think this story fits perfectly into the Scottish Noir genre that we’ve come to love over the last 30 years or so – Jekyll’s friend Utterson, played here by the brilliant Lorn Macdonald, is a kind of detective, trying to piece together what has happened to his friend, and I love telling the story in that way.

“As a director, I’ve always been driven by a fascination with what storytelling is – what’s the story, how is it being told, whose story is it? Stevenson is a great, complex storyteller, of course. And in this story, there’s plenty of space to explore questions that are very difficult to avoid, given all that’s happened over the last two years; questions about storytelling on film, how it works, and how it differs from storytelling in theatre – and about whether there’s something we can do, in these hybrid forms, that gives people something new, something they just can’t get from Netflix.”

Jekyll And Hyde is at Leith Theatre, Edinburgh, from 25-27 February, and at cinemas across Scotland on 27 February. Details at https://www.nationaltheatrescotland.com/events/jekyll-hyde#overview

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