Guest Blog: Playwright Charlie Howitt on JEKYLL & HYDE and NERVE

One of the things I love about theatre festivals - from Edinburgh to Brighton and right around the world - is the way you can move effortlessly from one world to another. The bread and butter of these festivals is the well-made one-act play, and ever increasing attendance suggests that the public appetite for this mode of storytelling is on the rise.

My company, Reverend Productions, is currently touring two one-act plays which have, at first glance, nothing to do with each other. Jekyll & Hyde is a modern response to the classic Gothic tale about the scientist with the murderous alter ego, while Nerve examines the rights and wrongs of taking the law into your own hands to curtail the activities of a serially abusive neighbour. Apart from the fact that both plays are performed by the same cast, you might imagine that any superficial similarities between the two were mere coincidence. But you'd be wrong.

For years now I've spent a lot of time thinking about repertory theatre and the unique experience it offered to audiences. The idea behind the repertory model is a simple one: the same company of actors, authors and directors presents a succession of plays which, over time, the audience comes to view as interrelated. Just like when we watch familiar film actors step into new roles and new scenarios, followers of a repertory company experience the same faces cropping up time and again, and - often subconsciously at first - begin to identify parallels which connect each new play to those which have come before.

With our current tour we're trying to accelerate that process. Both Jekyll and Nerve are set in the same apartment block, and each play's set is designed on the same floorplan. Every character is one play has a double in the other - a 'shadow self' who embodies similar qualities in a very different environment. The plays were deliberately written to intersect, occasionally overtly (the abusive neighbour from Nerve is also known to the residents who appear in Jekyll, for instance), but often the parallels are more thematic. Nerve features a character weighing the case for taking one man's life in the hope of saving others. Jekyll depicts a character suffering from a degenerative illness and contemplating the rights and wrongs of taking his own life.

Considering the seriousness of the subject matter, I was intent on doing two things when drafting and redrafting these scripts: first, they had to be utterly non-judgemental. Some writers like to use the stage as a kind of virtual classroom or pulpit to instruct audiences in their worldview. Our plays aren't like that: we present real people in complex personal circumstances and invite the audience to consider their chosen course of action.

For this reason, the post-show talk-back, which we host every night while on tour, is as much a part of the experience as the events on stage: we want to know how things play out as much as the audience does, and some of the suggestions, claims and counterclaims we've heard have really opened our eyes still further to characters we already thought we knew.

The second thing I was committed to was that these plays should be funny. Darkly funny, sure - at times even macabre - but dosed up on good humour nevertheless. There's a real danger with this subject matter of depressing and dispiriting your audiences; these plays won't do that.

One reason I love going to the theatre is that I get to be a part of the action taking place in front of me in a live setting. With my own work I want to involve the audience very directly by empowering them. These are two plays about morality that try very hard not to moralise. It's up to our audiences to judge the choices the characters make, and it's up to them each night to tell us how one play sheds light on the other and vice versa. You can come and see Jekyll; you can come and see Nerve; but by seeing both together, you open yourself up to a wider world of parallels, resonances, echoes and ghosts which pass between the two.

Find full tour dates for the double bill here

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