“Cinema is about change,” says Hope Dickson Leach. “We watch people transform. That’s the heart of the Jekyll and Hyde story.” In February, Dickson Leach’s hybrid production of Robert Louis Stevenson’s gothic classic Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is taking over Edinburgh’s Leith theatre. In an ambitious crisscrossing of media, her team will be simultaneously creating a live theatrical event and a livestreamed cinema screening. The combined footage from the live shows will later be edited into a feature film. “Our hunger for storytelling is different now,” the director says of the colossal project. “Audiences want an event.”
Dickson Leach is in her office in Leith theatre, bundled up in a coat, scarf and bright bobble hat. “Half of the theatre has no heating,” she says, her breath visible over Zoom. “I do have three heaters going, but it normally doesn’t warm up until lunchtime. Then at least I can take my hat off.” The winter sun is blinding through the large windows behind her. As she talks animatedly, she flits in and out of shadow and silhouette.
More than 120 film adaptations have been made of the Scottish author’s 1886 novella about an experimental scientist attempting to separate his good and wicked sides. But no version has been handled quite like this. With her unique blend of theatre and film, Dickson Leach is using the story to interrogate masculinity and control. “It’s a brilliant vehicle for looking at some of our most contemporary villains,” she says, “these enormous men in power. These monsters.”
For the audience at the live event in Leith, the experience should be fairly simple: they sit down and watch a movie in the auditorium. What makes it unique is that the movie is being made around them. “The whole building is the set,” says Dickson Leach. The audience will walk through the set on their way in and get glimpses of the cast and crew as they move about the building, using the nooks and crannies of the theatre as offices, laboratories and gentlemen’s clubs. As it happens, the action will be live vision-mixed on screen. “It’s being performed, shot and edited right in front of them.”
The following weekend, the footage will be shown as-live in Scottish cinemas. After that, the team will edit it into a feature film to be broadcast on Sky Arts, which will be scored by electronic artist Hudson Mohawke – who is also creating some tracks for the live show. At that point, Dickson Leach says, they’ll have footage from all three nights, as well as some rehearsal material. “It means we get to preview it,” she says, “like a theatre does. When we watch it with a live audience, we’ll see which bits lag, which scenes we need to cut. All of that stuff will have been tested.”
In rewriting the story, alongside Glasgow-based writer Vlad Butucea, Dickson Leach has moved the setting from London to Edinburgh. Many critics have suggested that the Scottish capital is the actual backdrop depicted in Stevenson’s book. “If you read it, you just do see Edinburgh,” Dickson Leach says. “It didn’t feel like a leap.”
By setting the piece in the Scottish capital she is injecting the story with the history of the city, particularly the ideas of inequality and hidden darkness that cascade through the book. “Edinburgh is the city of kings and rulers,” she says, “but this is a city where people lived underground for centuries, under the Royal Mile.”
On her lockdown walks, she learned more deeply about the city’s past. “I kept going to Warriston cemetery. It’s completely overgrown and the graves are falling down, and there’s also this flat bit of grass in the middle where we’d go and have picnics. Then we discovered it’s a plague pit.” And the beautiful gardens next to Princes Street, she says, used to be a lock where they’d dunk women accused of witchcraft. Echoing the duality of the book, Edinburgh is a city of contrasts. “Monuments are built on dead bodies. Scars of horrific behaviour are built into the city itself.”
Around her in the theatre, the film set is being built. She switches from a laptop to her phone and shows me around, pointing out which scenes are going to take place where. “This is being made to look like it’s all falling apart,” she says, picking at a peeling wall. “They’re building a set of stairs there.” We wave to the builders. “Then down here,” she says, “that’s going to be the lab.” At the moment, everything’s covered in dust and plywood. Only small details give away what it will really look like. She approaches an ornately carved door. “That’s for the gentleman’s club,” she says, zooming in. “It’s going to be shot in black and white so that gives us a nice licence. You don’t have to worry about colour and you can really look into texture.” She walks past a few metres of maroon wallpaper. “When you put this in black and white, it looks a bit like lace.” Once the show is over, the people who run the theatre have said they can leave up a lot of their additions to the space. “The building carries all the stories of the productions that have been here before.”
The process of picking out various rooms for the right scenes seems fun, but also incredibly complicated. “We have cameras for one scene here,” she says, pointing down a corridor on the left, “and then the next scene is two floors up on the other side of the building.” They’ve got six cameras to travel around with, sometimes changing lenses between scenes. “We’ve built in intervals to give us a chance to pull it off.”
When she was younger, Dickson Leach was part of the National Youth Theatre, and at Edinburgh University she made theatre in her spare time. Then film took over. Her thesis film The Dawn Chorus (2007) premiered at Sundance festival, and her debut feature The Levelling debuted at Toronto 10 years later, winning universal acclaim and a Bafta Scotland award for best screenplay. So when the National Theatre of Scotland, who are also behind Jekyll and Hyde, asked her to work with them on a piece during lockdown, she embraced the chance to work again with the stage. Called Ghost Light, and shown as part of the Edinburgh international festival, it was a love letter to theatres, leaping off the idea of the lights left on when a theatre goes dark. It was wonderful, she says, “working with them and falling back in love with theatre and the way it’s constructed”.
Her interest in the creation of theatre and film, and what makes them distinct from one another, is inspired in part by previous work she’s seen that breaks convention and genre. She describes watching the Wooster Group’s Hamlet, in which the experimental New York theatre company performs alongside a projection of the 1964 stage production starring Richard Burton. “It triggered something in my brain,” she says, “this interrogation between the forms.”
Over the lockdowns, her interest grew, but nothing she saw got as deep into the amalgamation as she wanted. “Filmed theatre has been being made for years,” she says. “But a hybrid has to be a conversation. Is there a place in the middle of film and theatre that is neither or both? That is the tension you have to embrace. And that is the central question of Jekyll and Hyde: how can you be two things at once?”
The word “hybrid” may have Frankensteinian connotations of something abhorrent, but when considering the blend of storytelling forms, it carries a sense of elevation. Does she see it as one or the other: good or bad? “I think a hybrid is a good thing,” she says with certainty. “If you’re positioning it as a monstrous thing, doesn’t that belong to a school of thought where purity is good? Isn’t that the Boris Johnson kind of 100% British thinking? The idea that hybridity is to be feared?”
Instead, she argues, this liminal space is something to be both celebrated and investigated. It seems her view aligns with Stevenson’s. When the author was asked if the duality within the book was really an allegory for one thing or another, he refused to clarify. “Everything is true,” he wrote, “only the opposite is true, too; you must believe both equally or be damned.”
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde screens as-live in select cinemas across the UK from 27 February.
