Female, late 20s/early 30s. A newly qualified doctor, recently admitted to a previously all-male profession. She’s young and tough, but inexperienced. Every man she meets is her superior and every doctor she meets could get her sacked. At key moments, she is dangerously attracted to the glamorous and controversial Dr Jekyll. She is intimidated by him and finally pushed beyond her fears into anger and action. Upper class English accent.

Female, late teens/early 20s. Mr Hyde’s first victim. A casual sex worker, working class, illiterate and fearless. In hospital for the first time. Finding out who assaulted her drives Dr Stevenson and the Matron in their search for the truth. Working class London accent.

Female, 50+. Works in the hospital where Dr Stevenson has just been posted and is much more experienced. She runs the ward – and the stage. She’s never worked with a female doctor before. Solid as a rock, stern, efficient and robust. Doubles as Mrs Poole, Jekyll’s housekeeper, in the story. In this embodiment, she shows borderline-unpleasant relish for its bloodiest moments of physical horror. Two different English accents (e.g. southern and northern).

Male 35-50. The same actor plays both roles. They have to accept and relish that they must literally have two bodies to play the two roles. They’ll need to change their clothes, their voice (its class, rhythm, breathiness), their posture and their relation to space – and especially to change the cadence of Jekyll’s confident walk into the alarming little pit-a-pat that Stevenson so brilliantly specifies for Hyde.

Dr Jekyll is a man in his prime: respected, cultivated, extremely wealthy, and single. A senior medical practitioner with the keys to society. In evening dress, he looks suavely and dangerously handsome. He has an Oscar Wildean command of language and a silky-smooth intellectual superiority mixed with profound guilt and secrecy. Most importantly, he is a high-ranking doctor. When young, he drank and used sex workers, like any other Victorian gentleman, but now his hobby is working in his home lab. In his experiments, he is a radical, espousing new theories of the interface between mind and body and pushing the boundaries of science. In society, he is a conventionally philanthropic and church-going conservative. Like all high-functioning addicts, he’s a highly skilled liar. 

Mr Hyde, on the other hand, is indefinable. Everyone says he appears to be inconsequential, slightly built, and young – but they insist that there’s something about him that is both curiously upsetting and profoundly chilling. No one can say, however, exactly what it is about him that produces this effect or even really what he looks like. He is more or less a psychopathic ape – a scuttling, gibbering little monster, a non-human – but only at the end, not at the beginning. At the beginning, his strongest characteristics are his weird neatness, detachment, icy bad manners, sudden fury, and a strong whiff of queerness. He is a dandy, but also the essence of cruelty, malice, selfishness and cowardice.