Mark Stratford has nowhere to Hyde
Posted on 17th July 2025
It was a return trip to Diss for Mark Stratford, who earlier in the year had impressed the Corn Hall audience with his show about Macready, the actor manager who arguably invented modern theatre. This time around he came with a show that, if anything, surpassed expectation – a superlative dramatization of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic morality tale.
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is, to a great extent, lost to us under the suffocating weight of countless distorted film and TV adaptations, so it was refreshing to see a version that stuck so close to both the letter and spirit of the original novella. It’s worth noting that Stevenson’s text doesn’t reveal the true relationship between Jekyll and Hyde until we are well into the story, so that the big reveal – spoiler alert – that they are one and the same person would have come us a visceral shock to the reader. It’s a testament to Stratford’s skill as both a dramatist and actor that he gripped the audience’s attention throughout the story’s early exposition, despite us knowing what’s coming next. As he deftly switched from one supporting character to another, the suspense of mystery was replaced by the suspense of expectation.
It was only after the interval that our expectation was finally sated – we got to meet Mr Hyde, as Stratford twisted his body and face in an acting masterclass. Aided only by a judicious use of lighting and sound events, the urbane Jekyll became the impish grotesque of the novella with little more than a demonic stare and a reworked vocal timbre. Equally striking was the reminder that Stevenson’s fable isn’t really about the struggle between good and evil. Jekyll is addicted to the thrills Hyde’s transgressions afford him, crimes he is too cowardly to experience as himself. Far from good, he’s arguably worse than Hyde, who at least can’t control his impulses. Stratford fully inhabited the anguish of realisation this morally ambiguous character experiences as surely as his more obviously repugnant alter ego. Little wonder that this remarkable performance was rewarded with a well-deserved standing ovation.