The Jekyll case

When Stevenson wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, London was a poor, smoky, dangerous city, ideal for being influenced by by noir and thriller.

In The Case of Jekyll, we have freed ourselves from the “strange,” from the philosophical theme of the double, of the boundary between good and evil, from the Faustian “going against divine laws,” to head down an investigative path, which takes the viewer by the hand into the underworld, to make him peek into the mystery and terror of a true crime story.

All the elements are there, and one wonders, “how did the events happen?” There are crimes, there is an investigator whom no one asked to investigate, who sinks into a prefreudian case of personality duplication. The spectator has an advantage over the investigator, he knows the facts, he is the protagonist, he collects the details, he examines the data and timely reconstructions. During the play we pose questions, the audience interprets and tries to understand the criminal mind, discovers the crime scene, searching for meaning. 

 Are killers born or do they become such? What are the factors that led Jekyll to choose to free himself and free Hyde “that right from the tormenting womb of consciousness these antithetical twins should be in perpetual tussle. How, then, to separate them?” Who did he decide to kill? Jekyll the good guy or the evil Hyde? This is the story “of an unclean soul manifesting itself outside the cocoon that contains it.”

THE JEKYLL CASE

based on Robert Louis Stevenson
adaptation Carla Cavalluzzi and Sergio Rubini
set design Gregorio Botta
costume design Chiara Aversano
lighting / sound design Salvatore Palladino
sound project Alessio Foglia
direction Sergio Rubini
with Sergio Rubini and Daniele Russo
cast being defined
production Fondazione Teatro Di Napoli - Teatro Bellini, MARCHE TEATRO, Teatro Stabile di Bolzano