The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
In Angela Barrett, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde has surely found its perfect visual interpreter.
Angela has produced eight beautiful pictures, working mainly in black and yellow to produce an atmospheric and sinister interpretation.
Ian Beck has provided an afterword.
‘Angela Barrett chooses to view the characters and events in the drama as if from a distance,’ he writes. ‘The images are often illumined solely by pools of gaslight. As one of the characters, Enfield, notes at the beginning of the story,
‘“I was coming home from some place at the end of the world, about three o clock of a black winter morning and my way lay through a part of town where there was literally nothing to be seen but lamps. Street after street, and all the folks asleep, and all as empty as a church”
‘It is as if the illustrator, taking this brief passage as her cue, had herself become just such an observing figure on a night beat; catching a rushed glimpse from a doorway as the terrifying and stunted Mr. Hyde flits across the street. She surrounds the characters in the story with foreboding, created by the deceptively simple device of empty picture space. Hyde crouches in a dark corner of Jekyll’s laboratory while light cascades down from an overhead well illuminating nothing but scattered retorts and benches. It takes a while for the reader to finally notice the sinister figure crouched in the shadow. Elsewhere in the story, on a moonlit street, Hyde, his back towards the reader, beats to death Sir Danvers Carew with a stick, witnessed only by cobbles and rows of seemingly blank windows but for one at the very top, where the pale haunted face of a servant girl can be seen, the only witness to the terrible event below.’
Printed by Hand & Eye Editions in an edition of 150 copies signed and numbered by the artist. The text is set in hot-metal Monotype Plantin and printed letterpress on Zerkall Ingres paper. The tipped-in illustrations were printed by Northend Creative Print, Print Week book printer of the year 2011.
){kind=small}
)