THE STRANGE CASE... To 4 December.
London
THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE AS TOLD TO CARL JUNG BY AN INMATE OF BROADMOOR ASYLUM
by Mark Ryan.
White Bear Theatre Club Kennington Park Road To 4 December 2005.
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Sun 4pm.
Runs 1hr No interval.
TICKETS: 020 7793 9193.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 20 November.
Minimal theatre making considerable impact.
Mark Ryan’s title recalls the Peter Weiss play known for short as The +Marat/Sade, though its point is different from either that of Weiss or the famous sixties RSC Peter Brook production. There’s the same idea of replaying events, and of insanity looming overall. But the 2-handed Hyde/Jung produced by Sly Fox productions (formed by the cast plus their extremely promising director) calls upon British fiction and the Austrian psychological analysis of Carl Jung as examples of human nature being an essentially divided entity.
Jung’s analyses of his murderous patient expound the respectable and ‘shadow’ sides of any personality. But Robert Louis Stevenson’s fictional Mr Hyde, so powerful a ‘shadow’ he’s thought to have killed his respectable alter-ego Dr Henry Jekyll, soon takes the therapist into uncharted areas. Stevenson’s Hyde was created by chemical experiment, as much a psycho-metaphor as Faustus’ Angels or Macbeth’s Witches. It’s one that allows the complete absorption of the willed side by the instinctive, linked here to Dionysiac violence and disruption as Hyde repeatedly replays his beating an innocent passer-by to death, a scene that acquires the formal ritualism of both drama and obsession.
Ashley Gunstock and Ali Amadi play both roles at different performances, suitably reflecting the different potentials of any individual. Certainly, Gunstock’s tall, craggily-featured Hyde is a menacing figure, challenging the smooth confidence with which Amadi’s Jung initiates their sessions. The authority of the hypnotherapist is questioned then openly challenged by the shadow Hyde as the sessions develop from authority figure and patient to 2 men alone in a room.
Played in neutral black clothing and white doctor’s coat in a plain space, Blanche McIntyre’s production focuses on character interaction, developing a sense of the interplay between reasoning, socially-adjusted behaviour and the freed expression of destructive desires. Gunstock’s brief reversion to Jekyll’s benevolence forms a stark contrast with the malevolence of his Hyde, something that makes the point about divided human nature as clearly as anything.
Suitably minimal for the disrupted medical procedures it demonstrates, this is a probing, fascinating hour of elemental theatre exploring human nature in unusually stripped-down form.
Performers: Ashley Gunstock, Ali Amadi.
Director: Blanche McIntyre.
Lighting: Richard Williamson.
Music: Bassic, John Katon.
Assistant design: Jessamy Willson-Pepper.
2005-11-22 13:19:47