There is no theatre-maker in Sydney with as much creatively voracious, playfully pioneering, well-funded ambition to collapse the categories of screen and stage than Sydney Theatre Company Artistic Director Kip Williams.

His very name now signals multimedia largesse and collaborative technical accomplishment. Buy a ticket to one of his recent shows, and you are guaranteed sleights, spectacle, constant movement and dizzying illusion; an almost baroque extravagance in style, which nonetheless always serves to complement, expand upon and dynamically express the story’s driving themes.

Above all – and as The Picture of Dorian Gray pinnacled – you are deeply impressed by the to-the-second timing of the whole apparatus, which is so acutely dependent upon the virtuosic talents of the cast and crew Williams manages to assemble.

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Ewen Leslie and Matthew Backer in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Sydney Theatre Company, 2022. Photo @ Daniel Boud

Such was certainly the case with his adaptation of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, that gothic fable of man’s multiplicitous (and duplicitous) nature penned by Robert Louis Stevenson, persisting in our cultural imagination as...