Last week the Manthan Street Theatre Festival reached to me as the Artistic Director of YTG and asked if I had any video I could send them to represent us in their festival. I think they want to take something and chop it up in to slices and make an Instagram post– I think they just want to list as many countries and collaborators as possible. It took me a while to figure out exactly what they wanted from me, and along the way I cut a few excerpts from last spring’s Jekyll and Hyde showcase. So I thought I’d present them as a sample of the kind of theatre work I’ve been making recently.
The video I’m presenting here was from a scene we devised called “The Interrogation”. We’d just shown a scene with Jekyll as a populist politician who puts a polite face on the violence of the state and now this Hyde, the ugly face of revolution, is a prisoner of that regime. In a little nod to the “Junior Anti-Sex League”, we had children administer the stylized beating.
While very little from the showcase survived to end up in the mainstage show, the idea of Hyde as a revolutionary was one that stuck deeply with me and made its return in another form in that final version of the adaptation.