Jekyll, Hyde, and Bluebeard
Within the
past two weeks I had the pleasure, dubious and genuine, of revisiting versions
of two of my favorite childhood horror tales: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and
Bluebeard. I originally became
acquainted with them in 1940’s –‘50’s types of mass media: comic books and
radio. I met Dr. Jekyll and his evil
alter ego in one of the many issues of Classics
Illustrated, probably the closest thing to graphic novels at the time, and Bluebeard on a popular kid’s Saturday
morning radio show, entitled Let’s
Pretend.
I was
addicted to Classics Illustrated,
where I first learned the plotlines of many of the Great (Dead, White People’s]
Novels of Serious Literature that I later read in the “real” books. The stories were laid out in typical comic
book format, with wonderfully lurid covers, and it was a great way to learn to
read. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde freaked me out so much, that I didn’t read
Stevenson’s original novella until a few days ago.
Let’s Pretend retold fairy tales in half-hour
segments, with a very talented young cast and good scripts (they hold up well
today; you can listen to a lot of them online).
These were not Disney’s stories, but unvarnished Grimm and Perrault,
with most of that original violence intact.
We used to wait for them each week, with a mixture of anticipation and
delightful fear, and let our imaginations run wild. Many of them were very,
very spooky to our seven and eight year old imaginations.
Unlike
urban legends, with their kernel of truth, these tales are fictional. But once
the idea of a dual personality gone wrong and a serial wife killer get into
your head, the stay there, lurking away, continually reinforced since they keep
getting retold in various media right up to now. As in any good tales retold, they are subject
to variation and updating. After all,
what horror can be pictured in a man who takes potions to bring out his dark
side, until a key ingredient runs out and he can’t get back? And what about that very rich man who lures a
number of women into marriage, only to kill (or sometimes only imprison
forever) them by tempting them beyond endurance by a secret he tells them they should never know?
Part One:
Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Agnes, Marguerite, Miss Gina, Ivy, Beatrix,
Emma, Lucy, etc. etc.
Robert
Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published in 1886.
It is a novella, short and spare.
It would be hard to approximate its earliest readers’ reactions since
the tale is so embedded in our popular culture, but all the revelations about
the Jekyll/Hyde dual nature actually don’t come out until the very end of the
work, when we finally hear Jekyll’s voice in the form of a posthumous
letter. All the material before is a
buildup by friends and observers, his old friend Enfield, the older
conservative Dr. Lanyon, and Jekyll’s valet Poole. Only two acts of violence is actually
mentioned: Hyde’s hit-and-run over a child in the street, the murder by Hyde of
Sir Danvers Carew.
No women
figure in the work at all, except a maid who witnesses the murder through a
window. Dr. Jekyll, 50ish and solid, is
very different physically from Mr. Hyde, who is smaller, younger, lighter, and
more menacing, but the reader is never told exactly how his appearance is menacing. Stevenson has Utterbank describing him:
“Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an
impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing
smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of
timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat
broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these together
could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing, and fear with which Mr.
Utterson regarded him. "There must be something else," said the
perplexed gentleman. "There is something more, if I could find a name for
it. God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we
say? or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell? or is it the mere radiance of a foul
soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent? The
last, I think; for, O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's
signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend."
Aside from the one murder and the
injury to the little girl, Hyde’s many nefarious deeds are never
described. Stevenson carefully builds up
a feeling of menace: Enfield sees the child incident and notes where the
assailant lives, also that Hyde pays damages to the injured child’s family with
a check signed by Jekyll. The lawyer Utterson has to deal with a mysterious
will in which Jekyll leaves everything to the then-unknown Edward Hyde, and
contrives to encounter him, while Lanyon finally see’s Jekyll’s transformation,
and eventually dies from the shock. The increasing darkness of the plot is
enhanced by the permeation of many scenes with a dense, sepia-colored London
fog that sometimes even penetrates interior rooms.
Also,
Jekyll is no saintly innocent, he is fully aware of a dark side to his personality
lurking somewhere, and his potion only brings this aspect to the fore, until it
begins to overtake his plumper 50ish doctorial side.
If you’ve
never read the original, do it! It’s
available free at the Gutenberg project online.
It is not
surprising how this story, with its ghastly split personality undertones,
captured and continues to capture the imagination. It is logical that the urge to dramatize it
began as early as 1887, and that so many plays and films have paraphrased
it. For a summary of all these
productions, readers can consult the Robert Louis Stevenson website and its
archive (www.robert-louis-stevenson.org/richard-dury-archive/).
Naturally,
one of the first changes to the plot is that if the same actor is to play both
sides of the doctor, and does his metamorphosis on stage, there is less
physical and age difference. Most drama
and melodrama has to have more dirty deeds by Hyde depicted, and the
Jekyll/Hyde dichotomy established very early, so the audience knows the
plotline almost from the beginning.
And then,
there’s the problem of Girls. Since
Stevenson doesn’t include any, the names of these females is at the discretion
of the adapter. By the first stage play, a fiancée for Jekyll is introduced,
and she is none other than the daughter of Sir Danvers Carew. By the time that John Barrymore does his
interpretation of Jekyll/Hyde in a film made in 1920, not only has Jekyll
become a saintly innocent to contrast to Hyde ‘s evil, but the nice fiancée
(Millicent Carew) is joined by a bad bar girl (incongruously named “Miss Gina”)
for bad Hyde to abuse. In spite of these
theatrical clichés, Barrymore and his cast pull off a compact (just over an
hour), performance that still carries off some of the horror of the novella. Part of the shivers comes from Barrymore’s
contriving to make Hyde look more or less beastly, and sometimes even eerily seductive,
depending on the circumstances, thus capturing something of Hyde’s evil
illusiveness.
Since 1920,
there have been many films and other versions, as well as parodies of
Stevenson’s work, and the girls appear in all of them. The ladies’ roles are
generally stereotypical cyphers, foils for the hero/villain, and little more. Some of these adaptations are really good (the
1931 film with Frederic March with good fiancée Muriel and bad girl Ivy seems
to be, by critical consensus, the best), but some are merely bad, and others
downright ugly.
For me, Jekyll and Hyde, The Musical originally produced
in 1990, and which I recently saw in a traveling revival, last week fits the
last category to a T. The New York Times critic, Charles
Isherwood, who reviewed a 2013 production sums it up perfectly in his opening
line: “Frank Wildhorn musicals: the crab grass of Broadway.” I won’t go into all the plot twists, except to
say that the Good Girl (Emma)/ Bad Girl (Lucy) aspect is really played up, and a plot
twist, borrowed from an earlier dramatization of Jekyll asking the medical
establishment in vain for permission to try out his potion on a prison inmate,
and his subsequent murder, in the guise of Hyde of the entire board when he is
turned down, are only the beginning of the problem.
The
interminable songs, with an explosion of words in each one that apparently adds
up to at least four times the number of words that Stevenson used, are couched
in a musical patter that I think stems from the musical Les Miserables or maybe Cats but
totally lacking their musicality and wit.
It takes
Jekyll three songs before he finally takes the potion (more or less: “I’m
thinking about it,” “Do I really want to do this?” and “OK, here I go”). I found myself wanting to call out TAKE THE
DAMNED THING ALREADY! When the act was
finally over, Hyde had knocked off a few people, mostly members of the medical
board and leered at the Bad Girl, myself and the friend I had come with could
stand no more; we left.
I made
myself watch the second act on You Tube in order to write this. It was just as bad, same explosions of words
to tuneless tunes, finally culminating in Jekyll/ Hyde doing a duet with
himself (accompanied by a lot of flinging around of hair), and dying at the
altar when, his key ingredient exhausted he spontaneously changes into Hyde
when he is about to wed Emma. At least I
had the option of fast forwarding. It
wasn’t the actors; they gave it their all, or the interesting lighting effects,
it was just that this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were smothered in an overdose of
useless words to the point of absurdity and overkill.
In any
adaptations of Stevenson’s other well-known work, Treasure Island, did anyone ever think of giving Captain Smollett a
loyal wife or Long John Silver a tavern wench to harass?
A Few Links (Not really Links, just copy and paste)
Charles Isherwood, reviewing 2013 review of Jekyll &
Hyde in the New York Times on 4/18/2013
“ Frank Wildhorn musicals: the crab grass of Broadway.”
“A
cursory reading of the libretto gives rise to yet another urgent question. Do
the clichés in the lyrics outnumber the exclamation points, or vice versa? But
I’m afraid I’d rather leave that one to those with a deeper interest in textual
analysis of Frank Wildhorn musicals.”
YouTubes of Jekyll and Hyde, The Musical: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ4uADMtmj8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9mC-7jZOVM (in
German)
A Link for the Barrymore film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-vS4NTPTmg
A link to the Stevenson Original: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/42/pg42.html
A database of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde plans and films:
