Strange Case

Robert Louis Stevenson has a terrible nightmare one night about a man who looks in the mirror and sees somebody else looking back at him. He wakes up screaming, decides it will make an excellent bogey tale, and begins work on the manuscript that will eventually be published as Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. But his wife, Fanny, hates it from the beginning, thinks it's evil, and convinces Stevenson to burn the first draft. But he can't stop thinking about it, and as he begins work on it again, the tale slowly begins to take over his life and transform it into a labyrinth of nightmares in which reality and fantasy blur. Hyde begins talking to him from in the mirror, then moves out into the world, and soon the fictional monster is interacting with people in Stevenson's life in a most alarming way. The Stevensons flee to Samoa, but make the fatal mistake of bringing along the mirror. In this funny and terrifying play about the nature of identity and the relationship of dream and reality to art, the famous actor Richard Mansfield tries to turn the tale to melodrama, Long John Silver appears to warn Stevenson about cellars and mayonnaise, and poor Jenny is pulled screaming into the mirror.