William Brodie is regarded as the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. He was Deacon of a trades guild and part of the Edinburgh establishment as a city councillor, but by night he funded a disreputable secret lifestyle with burglary, before moving on to more audacious crimes which proved his undoing.

Writer and performer Andy Dickinson presents Stanley as one of the gang. He has been caught in flagrante (Stanley’s inaccurate translations of Latin terms is a running theme) with a lady of ill-repute, and blackmailed by Brodie into becoming one of his accomplices. They seem an inept bunch; Stanley’s role as look-out involves him falling asleep until he is awoken by Brodie running for his life having tried to break into a house which is occupied. As reports of their exploits spread, Stanley is upset at receiving no credit for his role, but that’s counterbalanced by his relief at avoiding the noose.

Andy Dickinson clearly has a very good handle on his script, but the rhythms of his delivery are mostly unchanging and don’t allow for much light and shade. Taking some time to relax into the storytelling would allow him to engage with and react to the audience. The structure of the story is straightforwardly chronological, which reduces the potential for tension, as we know that Stanley must have escaped to tell his tale. An alternative perspective could find Stanley trying to keep his name out of it during the trial. There are also a couple of anachronisms in the script, for example a reference to a unicycle seems unlikely in the 18th century.

However, Dickinson’s comic creation, Stanley, has previously appeared in shows about climbing Everest with Mallory in the 20th Century and fighting with Napoleon in the 19th. So perhaps he picked up the terms then, as he moves further back in time in this amusing historical tall tale.