Jekyll and Hyde might have Robert Louis Stevenson turning in his grave but he surely would have chuckled.
This New Zealand show, with an ever-so-slight twinge of Kiwi under their faux-French accents, is young, lively, funny, rude, audience-inclusive and all in all the perfect mid-afternoon silliness.
And curiously, while playing Stevenson’s dark Edinburgh-inspired tale of good and evil for lots of dark laughter – the massacre of the English cricket team, better gun play than a spaghetti Western, it actually exposes the classic horror story’s spine of modern themes like addiction, mental health, and medication, or drug abuse.
“Pushing the darkness down”, we intone, pushing it down with our hands; it is a kind of karma for first week Fringe anxiety. But the darkness is coming, for your nutri-bullet and your sausage, with some deliciously obscene gags and hip-hoppy tunes for a festival where people love doing bad things at night.
Jekyll and Hyde, Assembly George Square Gardens, Piccolo Tent, 15.00
