For the first time in two dec­ades neither of the plays being staged by Bard in the Botan­ics, the rep­er­tory com­pany, is by Shakespeare. The Import­ance of Being Earn­est is on the out­door stage, while in the Kibble Palace glass­house Jen­nifer Dick has adap­ted Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Not­with­stand­ing the change of author, Dick gives the Robert Louis Steven­son thriller a Shakespearean sense of oratory. Our point of entry is the law­yer Gab­riel Utter­son, a nar­rator who eases us from the prose of the novella into a stripped-down drama. Played by an excel­lent Stephanie McGregor as con­fid­ante and con­science to Adam Don­ald­son’s arrog­ant Jekyll, Utter­son speaks in the vivid lan­guage of a storyteller, all lengthy sen­tences and iambic rhythms. The approach suits the heightened gothic melo­drama and, with Sam Stop­ford as a weaselly Mr Hyde, the act­ors cre­ate a tense three-way struggle.

Being less inter­ested in the mech­an­ics of the trans­ition from respect­able doc­tor to fun­lov­ing mur­derer, Dick focuses on the moral implic­a­tions of sep­ar­at­ing the good and evil sides of human nature. Blinded by ambi­tion, upright Jekyll ends up as degen­er­ate as hedon­istic Hyde. By con­trast, Utter­son reveals a sense of right and wrong that goes bey­ond the law­yerly. Behind her shock at her friend’s exper­i­ments is a deeply felt plea for moral respons­ib­il­ity.