‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde’: Edinburgh Review

Dir: Hope Dickson Leach. UK. 2023. 83mins

An atmospheric Gothic sensibility shrouds this black-and-white retelling of the Victorian gothic novel, which lets Robert Louis Stevenson’s original idea of the tension between progress and regression echo from the industrialist past into our present era of technical advancements and the threat they might represent. It was originally created in February 2022 as a hybrid performance with the National Theatre of Scotland, with audiences gathering over three nights at Edinburgh’s Leith Theatre to watch a film of the production which was simultaneously being performed around them, and caught on six cameras throughout the building. Now those recordings, with a few additional digital effects, have been edited into a feature which is, fittingly, having its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. 

An atmospheric Gothic sensibility 

It will go on to be broadcast on Sky Arts later this year, where its fresh considerations and inventive broadening of Stevenson’s ideas should hold plenty of appeal. While the period is retained, the action is transported from Victorian London to Stevenson’s home city of Edinburgh. It fits the place like a gentleman’s glove, not least because writer/director Hope Dickson Leach and her co-writer Vlad Butucea have laced it with additional references to the Scottish capital. Although much of the action takes place within offices and drawing rooms, Dickson Leach also makes judicious use of Edinburgh’s alleyways and landmarks (in footage that was edited into the live performances on the night) that open the stage production out and let its elements spread themselves beyond the theatrical wings. 

As with Stevenson’s original novella, it is lawyer Gabriel Utterson (Lorn Macdonald) who becomes our guide to this world. He is an old friend of Dr Henry Jekyll (Henry Pettigrew), the pair once so close Utterson had matching canes made for them both, in just one nod to a latent homoerotic subtext – although Jekyll pointedly doesn’t use his. It’s evident Utterson is a striver, still on the fringes of the moneyed society that Jekyll occupies not just easily, but almost sneeringly by comparison. Macdonald, who won Scottish BAFTA for his debut film role in Beats (2019), continues to impress. He imbues Utterson with a quiet desperation as his concerns mount about Mr Hyde, Jekyll’s mysterious lab assistant, for whom the scientist has changed his will and who seems increasingly mixed up in foul deeds around the city.

Those looking for Jekyll and Hyde transformation scenes or the scientist’s psychological agonising may be disappointed, although Mr Hyde’s appearances are made with menaces. The script trusts the audience to come equipped with the knowledge of Jekyll’s secret identity, so that the tension here is driven instead by whether and how Utterson will reach the same conclusion.

Dickson Leach showed an aptitude for controlling a disturbing mood in her melancholy debut The Levelling and, though the closes of Edinburgh are a long way from the Somerset levels, her grip here is no less tight. Hyde’s violence may mostly happen off screen but it is no less chilling, the director preserving the sense of monstrosity by never letting us get a good look at him. She mostly represents Hyde through close-ups of his mouth with its animalistically bent and rotting teeth and, occasionally and effectively, lets us see him reflected in the eyes of others, emphasising his role as a twisted mirror to humanity. John Cobban’s strong sound design, including a distorted voice for Hyde, and music from Hudson Mohawke and Hutch Demouilpied further stoke the sinister mood.  

At the same time as beginning a hunt for Hyde, Utterson seeks the patronage of wealthy Sir Danvers Carew (played with an enjoyably grotesque verve by David Hayman). Carew owns a brewery in the city which has just acquired a new piece of mechanical equipment that can do the work of multiple men, and Utterson has a less than worker-friendly idea about how the industrialist can work things to his advantage. In a further nod to class inequalities, the workers are facing eviction from the city’s shadowy vaults. Utterson is begged by one worker for help to prevent that while, at the same time, Carew is enlisting the lawyer to help move graves and build a monument on the city’s Calton Hill – with Dickson Leach and Butucea inventively creating a fictional backstory for the unfinished National Monument of Scotland.

And so, as Utterson becomes intent on destroying one monster, he is simultaneously feeding an inner power-mad one of his own. While Jekyll takes more of a back seat in this adaptation, Dickson Leach indicates that monsters come in all shapes and sizes and some hide in plain sight.