War drives people mad. How are they to cope once the fighting stops? Who will look after them?

Hayden Tee’s fierce staging of Jekyll and Hyde takes on these ideas with a passion. The setting is now a post-World War II military hospital, a bare box of a space decked out in dingy green and dull cream in Melanie Liertz’s evocative design. The action becomes a play within a play as patients and staff enter into a kind of collective enterprise of remembering and retelling traumatic events.

Brendan Maclean in Jekyll & Hyde, Hayes Theatre Co, 2022. Photo © Phil Erbacher

It isn’t easy to work out who the damaged ones are and who are those tasked with their care; it’s impossible to tell what is real and what is not. Identities are slippery and the atmosphere nightmarish as people move in and out of character.

The underlying story is unchanged. Seeking a cure for his father’s madness, Henry Jekyll (Brendan Maclean) attempts to separate good from evil and in the process creates his murderous alter ego Edward Hyde. In the context of Tee’s production this works as metaphor rather...