Actor Nick Sandys takes a break from a summer production of Much Ado About Nothing to chat with Resident Dramaturg Meghan Beals McCarthy about preparing for the title role in Northlight’s upcoming production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Meghan Beals McCarthy:  I am so excited to get into rehearsals and watch the internal Jekyll & Hyde world be built by you, Jessica and the rest of the ensemble.  (The external world is going to be gorgeous! The design team is incredible.)  And Jekyll is an amazing role; what are you doing to prepare?

Nick Sandys:  I, too, am very excited to begin.  I have begun re-reading sections of the play again, each day.  We have a short rehearsal period, just in terms of weeks, so we will have to hit the ground running.  I have also re-read the Stevenson short story again, just for any more clues and descriptions that can get the imagination working, and have done a little academic reading on the book, just to see where current scholarship is leading, since I know little about Stevenson's legacy other than that gained from the frequent film and television versions of his novels.  Other than that, I am playing Benedick [in Much Ado About Nothing]-- about as far from Jekyll as you can get, which is a terrific stretch and will provide and exciting leap in the opposite direction.  I accepted the offer to play Jekyll partly because I thought this role and this version would be a tremendous challenge.

MBM:  What do you think of Hatcher's adaptation?  I think it's kind of delicious.

NS: I think the adaptation is very smart, very theatrical, and very challenging -- as it should be.  This is story telling at its height, especially since it is a story we all think we know.  So as designers and performers we all have to come up to the high standard that Jeffrey Hatcher has set us in terms of coming at it anew.  His version is shocking, and raw, as well as theatrically sophisticated, so it will draw on all the skills we can muster to meet its challenges, physically and emotionally -- in the mode of great horror stories, it pushes the performer and viewer into extremes of behavior and keeps you there on the edge.  I also think Hatcher has managed to introduce a whole deeper level in the emotional story, and the strange tenderness at its heart.

MBM:  You are no novice when it comes to portraying literary figures onstage; you last graced Northlight's stage as Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.  Do you get nervous playing such well-known characters?

NS:  I do have to work through some nerves, simply because you know that everyone will come with added expectations, including myself--though I think that was perhaps tougher for Darcy, as he is every woman's fantasy of romance literature (or at least, for all Austen fans, of which there are millions), and then likewise of playing Freud the next year, in Galati's Oedipus Complex at The Goodman, since everyone also leaps to conclusions about who he was and what he thought because of his misrepresentation in current popular culture.  And I must also try to rid myself of my own buried assumptions about the character drawn from the versions I too have read and seen--even though that is actually impossible, of course, and one is always building upon, or reacting to, the traditions created by the prior cultural representations of these mythic characters.  But that is no different than if one were playing a famous Shakespearean character.  There have been brilliant interpreters of these characters that one can learn from, and one can pay tribute to one's predecessors without stealing from them.  After all, it is no more impossible for us to come at these stories completely afresh than for the audience--and it is to them and for them that we must re-tell this story for the first time and bring our own thrills to them.

MBM:   Speaking of Pride and Prejudice, many of the same cast members will be in Jekyll & Hyde.  Looking forward to the reunion?

I think five members of the six-person cast were involved with P&P, and several became very good friends during that show.  It was a delight to work on--and I am truly happy to have the chance to work and play with them again, especially on something so totally different--and at Northlight.  In fact, Patrick Clear and I will be performing together for the sixth time in three years, the first being P&P...and I don't THINK he's sick of me yet.....

MBM:  (I should know this... sorry) Have you worked with Jessica before?  What are you looking forward to most for rehearsals?

NS:  I worked with Jessica three seasons ago at Remy Bumppo Theatre, on a very different piece, a 1920s comedy called Aren't We All? by Frederick Lonsdale, in which I played a small role of a romantically-inclined Australian.  So I am really looking forward to teaming up again for many reasons: the script is far more theatrical and I am really looking forward to the process of creating the show's physical vocabulary with Jessica, because she has a great visual sense; she is so smart and yet warm, which I think is an ideal balance for this piece, which needs to balance its theatricality constantly with its heart--and its nerve-jangling; and she is also funny--it's going to be an exciting creative process.

MBM:  When was the first time you read the novella (or any of Stevenson's work), and what did you think then as opposed to now?  Knowing that you are going to embody the work, how does it affect your reading of it/what do you look for?

NS:  I read the story, probably, when I was 12 or 13.  My mother used to read novels to us at bedtime when I was very young, and since she new most of the classics very well, she we excise the boring bits or those she felt not suitable or sleep-inducing.  So she read us Kidnapped and Treasure Island but not Jekyll & Hyde. But of course, I had already seen the Lon Chaney/Karloff horror movies, including the Frederic March and the later Spencer Tracy Jekyll/Hyde, and as a 12-year-old found the story a little staid.  Of course, I had no sense of its narrative sophistication or literary heritage, of how it was playing with the art of story telling, of narration, just as Poe had done in his suspense stories.  I then read it again some 5 or 6 years ago when recording a version on CD-rom for reading-challenged early teens (for Don Johnston Inc) in here the suburbs.  I played all the characters, so returned to the novel to find details that I could build on to create the different voices.  Having recently studied narrative techniques in my post-graduate studies, I was immediately struck by the book's unusual structure and use of the letter-form to build tension and suspend both the narrator's and reader's full knowledge until the last possible moment.  Now as I approach it again, I find of course that I hear the play echoing behind the story.  I look for how and why Hatcher has made his adaptations and additions, how he has broadened the world of the novel and brought in some key new elements from the period to expand the story's social consciousness and sophistication.  And I look also for the brilliant Stevensonian descriptions of the fog, of the London streets, elements that we must imaginatively realize on the stage in order to create the fullest pictures for the audience, since the stage version has minimal, stylistic settings.