As I’ve blogged about a couple of times, the Victorian stage scripts adapting Jekyll and Hyde had a huge influence on subsequent adaptations. The two scripts I read this week are noteworthy in that they don’t stick as closely to that template as the Richard Abbott script reviewed at the link does.
As H. Leonard Cuddy’s JEKYLL AND HYDE has a large role for a maid (an unhappy one, raped in one scene, murdered later) I’d assumed Cuddy was influenced by Mary Reilly but no, this came out in 1981.
Jekyll here has the radical belief that intelligence and character aren’t something born into us: all our brains as bodily organs are equal in ability but education and social status leads to us burying a lot of it. This annoys both Dr. Lanyon and his niece Celestine — is Jekyll seriously suggesting that his uncouth new maid isn’t innately and obviously inferior to Celestine? Despite which Jekyll and Celestine become engaged in the “well, I guess you’ll do” matter of fact way some people apparently did back then. Unfortunately Jekyll’s experiments in unearthing what’s buried go in unanticipated directions … interesting.
In the introduction to his DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE script, playwright David Edgar admits he wanted to get back to Stevenson but instead found himself borrowing from later adaptations, including a maid inspired by Mary Reilly. Edgar’s script does restore Jekyll to bachelorhood but gives him a sister who represents the “new woman” of the late 19th century, the kind of independent, quasi-feminist woman he believes Stevenson’s sausage-fest of a novel was responding to. The story that results didn’t do much for me but like Cuddy’s, it’s an interesting variation on its theme (I’ve no idea how I’d respond to either of them were I not knee deep in Jekyll and Hyde thoughts). And I did find Edgar’s discussion of casting interesting: originally he’d chosen two men to play Jekyll and Hyde but he concluded the audience wants the tour-de-force of seeing one man assay both roles.
