This week's theatre in Scotland: Jekyll and Hyde, Jack and the Bean Pie, Finding Seaglass reviews

Attention in Scottish theatre is about to alight on Edinburgh and the city’s August festivals. There are still several shows to see outside the capital, though: at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, where productions of Gypsy, A Streetcar Named Desire, Brief Encounter and more are running in rep until September, and in Glasgow’s West End, where Òran Mór’s summer panto is selling fast and Bard in the Botanics has just opened its second pair of summer shows with Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and a new adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde.

Jekyll and Hyde (★★★★) – which occupies the ornate Kibble Palace glasshouse every evening until August – is a gripping slice of gothic horror. Director Jennifer Dick has filleted Stevenson’s 19th-century novella into a fluid, fast-moving three-man adaptation that feels both accessible and authentic. It has a cracking cast, too. Stephanie McGregor is fiercely finicky as lawyer-narrator Utterson, Adam Donaldson earnest and arrogant as Jekyll, and Sam Stopford cacklingly callous as his alter ego Hyde.

The story unfolds over 90 swift minutes, compellingly contemplating Stevenson’s themes of human nature and hubris. Designer Carys Hobbs takes just a few touches to evoke Victorian London in a Glasgow glasshouse, and Dick’s traverse staging deftly realises Jekyll and Hyde’s dualism without resorting to any unnecessary theatrical trickery. The manic denouement is particularly thrilling. 

Nearby, Òran Mór’s summer panto Jack and the Bean Pie (★★★★) – A Play, a Pie and a Pint production to all intents and purposes, although technically not – is entirely different but equally enjoyable. Writer and director Andy McGregor’s plot pays little heed of the fairytale it twists its title from. Instead, it revolves around Sprout-Town-Upon-Brie’s annual pie-baking competition and is essentially a flimsy structure in which the cast have a hell of a lot of filthy, decidedly not-family-friendly fun.

Fraser Boyle is brilliantly bawdy as Dame Jill, Richard Conlon excellent as crazed curmudgeon Farmer Frank, and Rebekah Lumsden terrific as faded rock star Farty Pellow. Expect all the classic panto tropes: singalongs, sketches, light satire and plenty of corpsing – just do not bring any children along.

On the airwaves, meanwhile, is Dunbar-based poet and playwright Hannah Lavery’s new drama, which was on BBC Radio 4 earlier this month and is available on BBC Sounds. In Finding Seaglass (★★★★), Lavery – Edinburgh’s Makar and writer of the sensationally stirring Lament for Sheku Bayoh (2020) – returns to the personal themes that permeated her 2019 poem-play The Drift.

Over 45 kaleidoscopic, time-hopping, perspective-jumping minutes, Lavery lyrically unpacks her tangled family history – “I’m from all the pink bits of the map,” she says – and her complicated relationships with her father, her country, and empire. It is enlightening and enraging, halting and heartbreaking by turns, and reconfirms Lavery as a vital voice on contemporary Scotland.