Chung Ying Theatre's JEKYLL & HYDE Begins Tonight at Platform Theatre

Jonathan Holloway's audacious adaption of Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll & Hyde re-renders this dark tale of terror and suspense as a genuinely disturbing thriller for our time. Following successful productions in London and Edinburgh in 2013, acclaimed director and playwright Holloway now delivers his own ambitious staging in association with Hong Kong's international touring outfit, Chung Ying Theatre Company.

The production will play the Platform Theatre, King's Cross, N1C 4AA tonight 28th July - Saturday 8th August 2015. Press night is slated for Wednesday 28th July, 8pm.

Dr Jekyll is here cast as a fascinating and dangerous female scientist, who comes to England from the Balkans. Clearly tormented by unspeakable horrors in her past (resonances of Balkan conflicts and ethnic cleansing), she conducts bizarre scientific experiments as she seeks safety by becoming a man. Using her own body as her laboratory, physical self-harming mirrors the psychological damage she has endured. This Jekyll tears out the heart of the issues it explores - gender, power, identity, self, freedom and individuality. Jekyll & Hyde is a visual feast that merges Weimer cabaret with a creepily melodramatic aesthetic underpinned by a stunning live audio score and soundscape that cranks up an atmosphere of claustrophobic hysteria.

Red Shift and Chung Ying's innovative cultural exchange (four UK actors and two from Hong Kong) has enabled collaboration between an extraordinary team of established theatre-makers, encouraging them to bring their visceral energy and innovative creativity to Jekyll & Hyde. These include Olivia Winteringham (artistic director of performance ensemble KILN) as Jekyll and Graeme Rose (Co-founder of Stan's Cafe? and Red Shift Company Member).

Writer-Director, Jonathan Holloway, comments, "This production of Jekyll & Hyde is a rebirth of Red Shift's much-loved signature style. A favourite with audiences, venues and critics for nearly thirty years, it has been lost to London since 2008. Now Red Shift returns in a genuinely unsettling re-imagining of a popular classic created in association with Hong Kong's Chung Ying Theatre Company."

We begin as a curious manuscript of obscure origin changes hands. It tells the tale of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - a story of desire, destruction and dastardly experimentation. Henry Utterson, an upstanding lawyer, discovers a connection between the alleged murderer Hyde and the respectable yet mysterious, Dr Jekyll. Utterson meets the elusive doctor - who is not at all as he expected. The narrative follows their relationship as their alliance progresses; he becomes increasingly entangled in Jekyll's dangerous involvement with blackmail, murder and transformative medication. This disconcerting world swirls about an uncompromising central performance that charts Tajemnica Jekyll's disturbed efforts to turn herself into a man through self-medication and brutal self-surgery. This is a tale of desire, psychological torment and desperation at its most extreme.

Different in scale to the Edinburgh and London 2013 runs, this production has been given a spectacular design, something akin to a laboratory crossed with an opium den.

Holloway's startling reimagining of Jekyll & Hyde opened in Hong Kong in April 2015. Ching Yung has recruited Jonathan Holloway to realise ambitious international touring productions in spring and summer of 2015 and 2016, supported by UK designer Neil Irish and composer Jon Nicholls.

For once the phrase "a theatrical experience unlike any other" is actually true.

For more, follow Jekyll and Hyde on Twitter @JekHydeUK or visit www.jekyllhyde.net.

DETAILS:

Jonathan Holloway's Jekyll and Hyde

Tuesday 28th - Saturday 8th August 8pm
No show on Sunday
1 hour 25 minutes (no interval)
£17.50, £15 (concession), £12.50 (UAL students), CSM student special £10 - must book before 1st July
Platform Theatre, Central St. Martins Granary Building, King's Cross, N1C 4AA
Ages 14+

The nearest underground station is King's Cross St Pancras (on the Circle, Metropolitan, Northern, Piccadilly, Hammersmith & City, and Victoria lines). Take the Regent's Canal exit. Turn right outside the exit to join King's Boulevard. Cross over the road at the top of the Boulevard and the Granary building is ahead. The nearest rail station is St Pancras.

Jonathan Holloway is best known as founder and Artistic Director of Red Shift Theatre Company which toured throughout the UK and beyond from 1982 - 2011, and was subsidised by Arts Council England from 1986. His work as a director, writer and teacher has been seen and heard all over the world. He has directed events ranging from pocket musicals to landmark reinventions of the classics; run companies and venues; written over 50 professionally produced plays; collaborated with some of the most important writers, designers and composers in British theatre. His writing is frequently revived by other directors here and abroad, and has been translated into Norwegian, Spanish and Cantonese. Jonathan has contributed a huge body of work to BBC Radio 3 & 4, and as a writer and director has won numerous awards including a First Prize at the 2013 Prix Italia, three consecutive Scotsman Fringe First Awards and the Shakespeare Prize and Best Actor Award at Chile's World Festival of Theatre. Jonathan worked on a radio version of Samuel Johnson's Rasselas (for independent production company, Essential) that was broadcast in May 2015. He is currently working on Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (the book which became the movie Blade Runner) has just been broadcast with a remarkable cast led by James Purefoy (The Following, Rome, Dance to the Music of Time, Flare Path) and Jessica Raine (Punk Rock, Garrow's Law, Robin Hood). Following last year's Chicago revival of Jonathan's Fall of Man, Kirsten Hemingway has given the show a new production for this year's RADA alumni Festival. In January he directed his own stage version of Les Miserables (pub Samuel French) with graduating students of Guildford School of Acting. In addition to this production of Jekyll & Hyde, he is writing and directing a vigorous new adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities for Hong Kong's Chung Ying Theatre. Alongside this Jonathan continues his collaboration with Royal Holloway University of London, with whom he is archiving Red Shift Theatre Company's thirty years at the leading edge of UK theatre making.

Chung Ying is one of Hong Kong's largest and most influential companies presenting ambitious work in English and Cantonese and delivering theatre of the highest calibre to the people of Hong Kong. Under the leadership of its Artistic Director Ko Tin-lung it promotes cultural exchange and enriches local life. It has staged more than 250 productions since its inception in 1979, and attracted over 100 nominations and 75 awards at the past 20 annual Hong Kong Drama Awards ceremonies. The company has its own extensive premises and maintains a close relationship with the Theatre Department of the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Acts.

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