Tag Archives: Theatre

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.

As chronicled in Jekyll and Hyde Dramatized, when Richard Mansfield brought his stage adaptation of Stevenson’s novel to England, one David Bandmann whipped up a mockbuster version starring himself. It violated copyright and Stevenson’s people got it shut down fast.

One of the things I’ve picked up on that most books haven’t is that an 1897 adaptation by Luella Forepaugh and George Fish is a direct knockoff of Bandmann’s script, whether authorized or plagiarized. It was more successful though, cutting out some of the worst parts of Bandmann (the choir of adorable moppets singing) and would be the basis for multiple silent films. It’s influence is substantial.

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE by Richard Abbott is a 1941 adaptation that appears to owe a lot to the Bandmann/Forepaugh-Fish version, including a comic-relief Irish cook, Hyde declaring that he enjoys attacking helpless women and children and a similar arrangement for changing Jekyll to Hyde. That said, Abbott does chart his own path on some things, such as an emphasis on the age gap between Jekyll and his lady love. It’s still being performed in the 21st century, but I find it slow, tedious and talky. One element that didn’t transfer from stage to film is Sir Danvers Carew’s daughter demanding Jekyll help capture Hyde (the movies shifted Carew’s death to the end of the story so there’s less time for that).

AMERICANS AGAINST THE CITY: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century by Steven Conn looks at how Americans a little over a century ago began grappling with the idea that the majority of the population was now urban, an unsettling thought for a country that defined Real Americans as living in small towns and on farms, not wage slaves and drones living in the big city. Plus cities were dysfunctional in a lot of ways — slums, corrupt political machines, immigrants, how could they possibly be the heart of America?

The initial response from early 20th century progressives was to fix the cities: better government, slum clearance, parks, education (the swimming pool controversies of Contested Waters fit right in). This proved a tougher task than expected, leading to counter-arguments that the solution was to support authentic rural lifestyles as the real America, or to build new towns that could be perfectly, efficiently run from the first. Neither solution worked: support for traditional Appalachian crafts, for instance, mostly turned them into a cottage industry providing kitsch for urbanites with money.

What ultimately changed the game was the federal government building the interstate highways. Not only did this destroy many settled city neighborhoods, it made it possible to leave the city to live and commute there for work. City populations stopped growing and often shrunk, as did their revenue base. The Reagan era further intensified the problems by insisting government is the problem so government doing anything to fix things was pointless.

The focus on urban planning rather than the pop culture perception of cities wasn’t quite what I wanted. However I’d still rate it as an interesting book.