Jekyll and Hyde

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 297, 2 March 1945, Page 9

Jekyll and Hyde

HE jazzing of the classics brings forth enough protests to make one hope that in the long run it will not be allowed to do. permanent harm. There is another type of plagiarism, equally obnoxious, which continues unchallenged, the adaptation of literature’s classics for radio presentation. A glaring example is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, some of the early chapters of which I heard from 4ZB. The story has been extended by the invention of incidents of Jekyll’s Public Schooldays, and he appears as a completely immoral youth who presented a spotless record for the headmaster’s

benefit while zealously corrupting his classmates in private. Before he leaves to begin his University career he has murdered a companion and forced a girl to begin leading a dissolute life in London. Heaven knows, the original story contained horrors enough without inventing others. Stevenson intended no cold, calculating, conscienceless criminal when he made Dr. Jekyll. The whole point of his tale was that Jekyll was not a bad man, but a good one, that Hyde is merely the evil latent in Everyman. And the horror of his story lies in the fact that every reader, good or bad, must recognise something of himself in both characters. With the radio character any such subtle attempt at morality vanishes. Jekyll is presented as a character so evil that he becomes just another "criminal type," as remote from ourselves and our emotions as an unimaginative scriptarranger can make him.