DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE

Rose Theatre, Kingston until February 17, then touring until May 19. Tickets: 020 8174 0090 (touringconsortium.co.uk/ show/jekyll-and-hyde) PHIL DANIELS’ persona has evolved mightily since the Jack-the-Lad days of Quadrophenia. He is a considerable asset to David Edgar’s adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s most controversial novel and gives the production a necessary kicking from time to time.

Edgar’s play is notable for its dullness, substituting the simmering conflict and transgressive violence of the novel with discussions about the duality of Man.

Gentle Dr Jekyll (Daniels) retrieves his father’s scientific notebooks from his sister Katherine (Polly Frame making the most of an underwritten part) and finds the formula for “metamorphosis”.

So he begins a course of self-experimentation from which there is no return. Unleashing the bestial Mr Hyde within him, Jekyll struggles to control his alter ego as he embarks on a rape and murder rampage.

Kate Saxon’s production is well designed and dressed by Simon Higlett and it gathers momentum as cigar-smoking characters toss around theories about the nature of evil, much to the amusement of the underclasses: Jekyll’s manservant Poole (Sam Cox, wryly amusing) and maid Annie (Grace Hogg-Robinson, excellent).

As the set shifts to his laboratory we see him drink a glowing red liquid and transform into Mr Hyde. No make-up, no special effects. Simply a change of accents from refined Morningside to the Gorbals. Daniels’ Hyde is more unpredictable Glasgow drunk than psychopath which is an interesting idea, if not a terrifying one.

Edgar’s distinctions between the privileged few who exist in a “dish of light” and those who inhabit the “sea of darkness” surrounding it is closer to HG Wells’ The Time Machine than Stevenson’s novel.

But the merging of Jekyll and Hyde into an inhuman Victorian father figure has an ineffable logic. I only wish it had been more thrillingly conveyed.