I've just watched a fascinating programme on BBC4 which collected all the interviews that comedian Peter Cook did with chat-show host Michael Parkinson in the 70's, and in passing Cook mentioned that he'd written a script for a film that was to be made the following year called 'Dr. Jekyll & Mrs Hyde'. It was to be produced by Michael Medwin, who had met Cook after seeing him in 'Good Evening' on Broadway circa 1975, going backstage afterwards to meet the show’s writers and cast, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. During this encounter Cook told Medwin of an idea which was to have a Dr Jekyll who mutated not into Mr Hyde, but into a beautiful woman who was really the first Woman’s Libber. Medwin and Cook had several follow-up meetings to discuss the idea, and Medwin commissioned Cook to write the screenplay, announcing in an interview with Sheridan Morley in 1975 that the film was in preparation and “we hope to make it in the next year”. Cook actually finished his script not in 1975, or even 1976, but on Wednesday the 19th of January 1977, presumably after struggling through many structural problems regarding the film’s story. It was described by Cook in the script’s foreword, “though predominantly a comedy, is also a love story, a study in narcissism and an exposé, in funny terms, of the hypocritical Victorian attitude towards women. Dr Jekyll, though outwardly respectable, is an adventurer. His alter-ego, Mrs Hyde, the only woman he can really love, represents everything a Victorian lady should not be”. The foreword concludes: “Mrs Hyde’s outrageous modes of dress and behaviour cause understandable shock to her contemporaries. To many of them she seems as horrifying as the Mr Hyde in the original Stevenson story”. As for the actual story of the film, that was summarised by Dudley Moore in the November/December 1979 issue of Film Comment: “Dr Jekyll turns into a woman and falls in love with the woman, but can never meet her because he either changes into her or Dr Jekyll. It’s a wonderful premise”. I don't recall ever seeing the film, and some investigation online confirmed that it was in fact never made, but amazingly the script is available to read online, and so as a bit of a departure from the music, and because I'm such a huge Peter Cook fan, here is the script for his never-made film 'Dr. Jekyll & Mrs Hyde'.
