Battle of wills in need of thrills

TWO for the price of one! Surely an offer that is too good to be refused…

Or can it?

Well Phil Daniels acts his socks off in the title role, or should that be roles, and others impress too, but overall J and H didn’t quite set the pulse racing.

It tries but doesn’t actually hit the realms of a pacy thriller which sets the spine tingling - but it does have its moments.

A game of hide, which could have been Hyde, and seek, involving the doctor and his niece and nephew, fuelled a flight of fantasy early on but those hopes didn’t quite take off.

It did improve after a slumbering start - which is too much of a methodical plod as theories are expounded and we are slowly, but surely, led into the battle of wills that are about to be unleashed in the doctor’s mind.

The dark set didn’t exactly help. Quite stark, purely functional, apart from when at the country home of Jekyll’s sister, Katherine, exquisitely played by Polly Frame. All is light and bright, but around the vicinity of Jekyll’s London abode we do have the bleak blackness and depths of the capital in Victorian times.

There have been many interpretations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s originally short 1886 novella in the past century or so, a few fairly radical offerings as the story has been re-told on the big screen, television, in stage plays, musicals and even a ballet.

It’s pretty obvious why this gothic thriller attracts so much attention - being a tale of good versus evil, that of a chilling split personality of the human mind.

Director Kate Saxon could surely have coaxed more from this adaptation by David Edgar, which was initially written almost 30 years ago for the Royal Shakespeare Company, before being revised a few years later.

It’s none the better for it. The first act dragged with a lack of momentum, no real thrills to cajole you to the edge of your seat until well into the second half when attention, which had been on the wane, was forced back into line to concentrate on immediate events.

And then, with the finishing post in sight, it thankfully became a grandstand finish as Jekyll’s alter-ego was unmasked. Especially when his friend Utterson, an impeccable offering from Robin Kingsland, asks where he has been - and he replies: “Oh, just hiding away.”

All this after he had retrieved his late father's scientific notebooks from his sister containing the formula for ‘metamorphosis’, and thus began his laboratory experiments which he learned to his cost - after Hyde’s rapes and murders - there is eventually no escape, no return to the gentle gentleman.

All achieved without those regular facial and body contortions but with a Glaswegian accent(s) from both sides of the tracks.

By the way, Simon Higlett’s costume design fits the bill admirably. Quite top hat!

So two for the price of one was a fair deal in the end - largely thanks to the splendidly stellar efforts of Phil Daniels. It was quality as well as quantity.