Chemical Imbalance

Chemical Imbalance is an original play by Lauren Wilson based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In this comedy of horrors, director Matthew Graham Smith, an associate artist with the Dell’arte Company, leads a delightful ensemble of nine comic actors in the highly stylized conventions of farce and Grand Guignol (a theatrical genre akin to cinema’s splatter-film).

As in Stevenson’s novel, the plot twists around a learned upper class doctor who experiments with a potion that neatly divides the good and bad sides of human nature. In Wilson’s version of the tale, Victorian London is the seat of a global empire on the verge of collapse, one which relies on several forms of social repression to keep its home population under control while the empire expands abroad. Murder, mayhem, and crumpets abound in this romp through an empire on the verge of collapse and a man tight-rope-walking the line of aristocracy and depravity.