“In the very early days of our association I was even so daring as to ask him to scrap Jekyll-and-Hyde and let me do a version of Dorian Gray for him. That really tore it! ‘Don’t ever mention that man to me again,’ he said; ‘Oscar Wilde dragged his God-given genius in unspeakable mire, and the greatest kindness we can do is to forget his name. Besides, my public wouldn’t hear of it.’ So I was stuck with Jekyll-and-Hyde.

“Stuck even worse than I had at first supposed. Ages and ages before, at the beginning of their career together, Sir John and Milady had concocted The Master of Ballantrae themselves, with their own innocent pencils. They made the scenario, down to the last detail, then found some hack to supply dialogue. This, I discovered to my horror, was what they had done again. They had made a scheme for Jekyll-and-Hyde, and they expected me to write some words for it, and he had the gall to say they would polish. Those two mountebanks polish my stuff! I was no hack; hadn’t I got a meritorious second in Eng. Lit. at Cambridge? And it would have been a first, if I had been content to crawl and stick to the party line about everything on the syllabus from Beowulf on down! Don’t laugh, you people. I was young and I had pride.”

“But no stage experience,” said Lind.

“Perhaps not, but I wasn’t a fool. And you should have seen the scenario Sir John and Milady had cobbled up between them. Stevenson must have turned in his grave. Do you know The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? It’s tremendously a written book. Do you know what I mean? Its quality is so much in the narrative manner; extract the mere story from it and it’s just a tale of bugaboo. Chap drinking a frothy liquid that changes from clear to purple and then to green—green if you can imagine anything so corny—and he shrinks into his wicked alter ego. I set myself to work to discover a way of getting the heart of the literary quality into a stage version.

“Masks would have helped enormously. But those two had seized on what was, for them, the principal defect of the original, which was that there was no part for a woman in it. Well, imagine! What would the fans of Miss Annette de la Borderie say to that? So they had fudged up a tale in which Dr Jekyll had a secret sorrow; it was that a boyhood friend had married the girl he truly loved, who discovered after the marriage that she truly loved Jekyll. So he adored her honourably, while her husband went to the bad through drink. The big Renunciation ploy, you see, which was such a telling card in The Master.

“To keep his mind off his thwarted love, Dr Jekyll took to mucking with chemicals, and discovered the Fateful Potion. Then the husband of the True Love died of booze, and Jekyll and she were free to marry. But by that time he was addicted to the Fateful Potion. Had taken so much of it that he was likely to give a shriek and dwindle into Hyde at any inconvenient moment. So he couldn’t marry his True Love and couldn’t tell her why. Great final scene, where he is locked in his laboratory, changed into Hyde, and quite unable to change back, because he’s run out of the ingredients of the F.P.; True Love, suspecting something’s up, storms the door with the aid of a butler and footman who break it in; as the blows on the door send him into the trembles, Jekyll, with one last superhuman clutching at his Better Self, realizes that there is only one honourable way out; he takes poison, and hops the twig just as True Love bursts in; she holds the body of Hyde in her arms, weeping piteously, and the power of her love is so great that he turns slowly back into the beautiful Dr Jekyll, redeemed at the very moment of death.”