Durham Fringe Festival 2024
Jekyll & Hyde: A One-Woman Show
Sweet Productions
Genre: Solo Performance, Theatre
Venue: The City Theatre, Durham
Festival: Durham Fringe Festival
Low Down
Heather Rose-Andrews presents a finely tuned, breathtaking performance as a female Jekyll and Hyde. “Stevenson’s classic science-horror is reborn, with award-winning performer Heather-Rose Andrews in the titular role. Class, terror, and hypocrisy in Victorian London, as the search for self collides with the lure of the sensuous, taking its toll on all around Jekyll & Hyde.”
Review
FringeReview has reviwed this show elsewhere it it received an “Outstanding” rating. So what else is there to say? Well, this particularly reviewer had not seen it. I’ll say from the outset that I know the director of this piece, J.D Henshaw personally though I do not know the solo performer particularly well and do feel qualified to review this as a piece of solo theatre.
I concur with the rating given by our previous reviewer, Simon Jenner:
“This adaptation not only interiorises the whole process, returns us to the vile and violent laboratories of the story’s epicentre: it also reframes the debate. Andrews’ dual characters narrate with a growing self-awareness, pleasurable or not as the case may be. Dragging it into a disquisition Henshaw and Andrews then ensure it’s the most viscerally convulsive realisation of Jekyll or Hyde imaginable.”
Despite some limited available lighting, the show is an uncomfortable watch for good reasons. Heather Rose-Andrews plays the female Jekyll-Hyde construct with studied grotesqueness. And both Jekyll and Hyde are indeed powerfully grotesque. The cleverness in the writing here is to make Jekyll, often protrayed as the “good guy” as even more horrific than Hyde. Jekyll is the one guilty of hubris, whereas Hyde has a sincere disbelief in an ultimate creator. Hyde emerges as horrific, for sure, yet is the more sincere of the two, in many ways the more authentic. A hypocrisy lies at the heart of Jekyll’s motives. This though flashed through my mind more than once: Jekyll is not a nice person. This sets up a much more interesting polarity, not a simple one between good and evil but a see-sawing on stage between different kinds of evil. That is what makes this piece of well written solo theatre different from many other renditions of the classic.
Staging is simple, gothic in the choice of furniture, lighting and textiles. The heart of this show is, of course, the bravaura performance of Rose-Andrews who exudes dark sensuality, fury, violence ready to erupt, and yet also our Hyde can be subtle, ironic and deeply philosophical. Hyde is raw in her honesty and has literally massive powers of self-insight. The transitions to and fro and skilfully realised and might just make you jump on occasion. I was not convinced that Jekyll’s experiment was ultimately worthwhile we are offered no easy answers in this production. Is the senselessness of of vioilence ultimately trumped by our attempts to externally control or prevent it? Can chemistry cure the darker aspects of the human condition? Perhaps thw question is not even the right one to ask. And that leads to the startling realisation that Hyde is trying to understand herself and her violent strength, not because of Jekyll, but in spite of her. Sexual desire and sensuality is also well portrayed and explored in this version and they physical theatre here is effective and affecting.
As audience, we are led into some uncomfortable territory. Of course we end up feeling for Hyde even as she disgusts us. But we are invited to consider an equal aversion ot Jekyll, her motives and intentions. I ended up wondering if Hyde deserved to prevail in a classic story that has always made me wonder if the title ought to have been Jekyll or Hyde. The glorious challenge of this well crafted piece of solo horror theatre is you find yourself leaning in to this layered story, so well realised and delivered theatrically, even as all your instincts tell you to look away.
