Review: SHERLOCK HOLMES, Regent's Park Open Air Theatre
New mystery makes for a spectacular night out at London's most spectacular venue
I blame Scooby Doo.
Give me a police procedural and my eyes glaze over. David Suchet’s Poirot explaining each step of an investigation like Delia Smith explaining a souffle? No thanks. Nor can I watch Daniel Craig with his fey Tennessee Williams’ drawl sit in a big chair while everyone around hangs on his every word like it’s storytime at the local Under-5s group and Mr Tickle is on the bill.
It was with a slightly hesitant step that I ventured to the theatre so near to 221b Baker Street that I could probably catch the aroma of opium smoke with a fair wind. I had layered up like Captain Scott against the cold (to be fair, very few took the Captain Oates option and stepped outside at the interval, which is a considerable testament to the production) and I was delighted to see an action-packed opening - gunfire, treasure and a boxing match! Not a “Can you explain what you were doing in the library with the candelabra, Professor Plum?” to be heard.
In fact, director, Sean Holmes, and his movement director, Charlotte Broom, emerge as the stars of the show, almost always a black mark in my book for any production. But not this time. Aided by Grace Smart’s whirling circular set and her costume design (with Lisa Aitken), the static dryness of exposition may not be entirely eliminated, but it is certainly mitigated. Seldom can a character portrayed as often as Holmes on stage and screen, been vested with such energy.
That’s partly a product of Joel Horwood’s new story, positing Holmes and Watson as young men on the lookout for thrills and spills as much as cases to crack. Borrowing heavily from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s, The Sign of the Four, there’s plenty to please the legions of fans of the canonical works (and, more for its style than its genre and despite my misgivings above, I’m one of them) but plenty too for a 21st century audience attuned to the contradictory psychology of the man and of the legacy of Empire.
Key to this melding of past and present is Joshua James, whose Holmes carries more than a hint of bipolar disorder in his wild mood swings from the manic chasing of clues to his periods of Victorian melancholy, locked away with his pipe and violin. There’s an allusion to symptoms associated with the Autism Spectrum too, but these very modern concerns are never rammed down our throats. Instead, James finds something of Rik Mayall’s ability to fill any space with a hugely expressive face, a compelling physicality and a dangerous comedy. This can be an exhausting show to watch at times - that said, not unpleasantly.
The yin to James’s yang, Jyuddah Jaymes gives Dr Watson an everyman decency, always a little awed by his virtuoso friend, but mostly happy to play second fiddle, indulge (most of the time anyway) Holmes’ fondness for narcotics and insist that the detective keeps his eye on the ball.
His eye is taken by the mysterious Mary (an inscrutable Nadi Kemp-Sayfi), whose birthday gifts and inheritance of a treasure captured in fraught circumstance during the Indian Rebellion of 1857, drives the engine of a plot that allows a dizzying array of Victorian characters to be played by a tremendously committed ensemble cast.
Mary’s origin story (and it’s not the only one in the play) underpins critical reflections on the nature of colonialism, how its power was maintained and projected, and what we should do about it now in a multicultural society with very different (I hope) ideas about how to treat foreign cultures. There are times when those ideas feel a little wedged into the plot pushing the runtime out well beyond the two hour mark, but, on the evening of the day of the State Opening of Parliament, it’s hard to claim they’re not relevant. Nor, with a bag search on the way in, can we forget that the roots of terrorism lie deep in our past.
There’s time for a very spectacular finish and a clever denouement that came a little too quickly for me, and we’re sent off to find our way out of the park while running the narrative twists and turns through our minds once more.
Oh, and on to the Tube at Baker Street - where else?
Sherlock Holmes at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre until 6 June
Photo images: Tristram Kenton
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