Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson's classic tale of dual identity lends itself well to multiple adaptations - over a dozen different films have been based around The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and a new BBC version is due next year.

Playwright David Edgar has had more than one shot at it himself - his first version, staged in 1991, saw two different actors playing Jekyll and Hyde. Five years later he revised the play so that one man played both, and this is the version that Perth Theatre now present.

Clearly it's not possible to effect a complete physical transformation on stage - in the novel Hyde is much smaller, younger and hairier than Jekyll, with a face that strikes horror into the hearts of anyone who beholds him - but director and designer Graham McLaren has opted to rely entirely on performance to convey the transformation. The result is confusing.

Kevin McMonagle's Edward Hyde speaks with a broad, comical Cockney accent that contrasts the refined tones of Henry Jekyll, reflecting fear of an underclass uprising and setting up a neat conclusion in which it's a lowly servant, rather than a learned doctor or lawyer, who finally clocks what's going on.

It is crucial to the story's plot, however, that Jekyll's friends and colleagues fail to recognise him as Hyde, and here their confusion is simply laughable.

Which is a shame, because this is a handsomely staged production which makes clever use of incidental music. The semi-opaque walls of the conservatory-like set allow characters outside (and cellist Robin Mason) to be partially obscured - an effect that might be spine-chilling if only the production's overall tone was not so comical.

Edgar has given Jekyll a sister, niece and nephew, so the audience needn't rely on the doctor's friends as character witnesses as in the novel, but a back story about a sinister event from the past poses more questions than it answers about the origins of Hyde.

The right production could bring out the still-pertinent issues of class politics and psychology raised by Edgar's thoughtful, if slightly muddled, adaptation. Alas, McMonagle's toothy, almost camp Hyde is more like a panto villain than a chilling manifestation of man's darkest desires.