Writer: Robert Louis Stevenson
Adaptor: Helen Eastman
Director: Nicky Cox
Creation Theatre has a history of seeking out different spaces in Oxford in which to perform, and the Ovada Gallery is, on the face of it, a challenge. A cavernous warehouse like a disused workshop or garage, with big, red-painted double doors and a long staircase up one side to a mezzanine floor, and black-curtained skylight windows: it requires some imagination to see it as a theatre in which to perform this version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s gothic horror novella.
But writer Helen Eastman and director Nicky Cox rise to this challenge with enthusiasm. A couple of pine tables and chairs in the middle, surrounded by heaps of phials and retorts and rubber tubing and hourglasses, create Dr Jekyll’s home and laboratory. The audience is scattered about higgledy-piggledy, spilling into the set, and thus more intimately involved in the action.
An upright piano stands at the edge, allowing two of the actors to strum composer Alex Silverman’s score (based on the work of Victorian trail-blazer Alice Mary Smith), like the accompaniment to an early silent film. Three apparently period gramophones stand at the edges, and the actors use them to play discs of more of the music and sound effects.
Will Alder’s lighting is precise and varied, picking out each character’s appearances all over the sprawling set, with atmosphere added by the haze emitted from a single unobtrusive smoke machine. The whole thing is constantly inventive and engaging – as also in the occasional gentle interaction with members of the audience.
Eastman has kept pretty faithfully to the detail of Stevenson’s story, and the three actors handle it with confidence. Jim Scott is Jekyll and Hyde, and manages the repeated transformations from one to the other very effectively – while consuming in the process an alarming quantity of vividly red potion. He is, by turns brisk, authoritative, tortured and malevolent, and carries the weight of the narrative.
Jack Benjamin is a pleasant and open Gabriel Utterson, the observer through whose eyes we see the story, and his straightforwardness is a perfect foil for the complexity of Dr Jekyll.
And Alex Ansdell covers the remaining figures. He is earnest and dutiful as Poole, Jekyll’s butler, who leads Utterson to the final discoveries. He also gives us Mr Enfield, who sees Hyde murder a little girl early on – a scene effectively dramatised by a little puppetry – and Dr Lanyon and Hyde’s other victim, Sir Danvers Carew.
As a combined venture between actors, director, writer, designer, Immy Howard and lighting designer, this is an entirely effective 90-minute experience, and well worth a visit.
Runs until 17 May 2026
