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Since Arthur Conan Doyle was a spiritualist who believed in life after death, it’s possible that this garbled take on his famous detective is designed to drag the author, shrieking, from the grave. Joel Horwood’s script, loosely based on his story The Sign of Four, is an uneasy mix of postmodernism and panto, almost every line delivered with clownish, tongue-in-cheek irony. I’d assume it was aimed at younger theatregoers if it weren’t for the f-words and drug use.
Sean Holmes’s production stars Joshua James as a young, blond and stroppy version of Sherlock. Clad in sky-blue trousers and waistcoat he’s fond of chemical stimulants and prizefighting, like Robert Downey Jr’s manifestation in Guy Ritchie’s films.
Rooted in a thrusting Victorian London where new markets and prisons have been built and Tower Bridge is under construction, this staging uses the original story’s fear of unrest in “the colonies” to critique the Empire that fuelled this progress. The structures of government and administration, the uniforms of redcoat soldiers and top-hatted civil servants, are all part of the “performance of complete control”.
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At the same time, it analyses Holmes and Dr Watson (Jyuddah Jaymes) and the nature of their relationship in ways that recall the modernised BBC series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, and the 1970 Billy Wilder film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Is Holmes closeted and/or neurodiverse? Is Watson suffering from PTSD after being wounded in Afghanistan, and is he, as a black man, also a victim of colonialism? Who knows? Who cares?
Because this is a muddle from start to finish, the action progressing in fits and starts and the characters and the language showing no internal logic. (Would Baker Street landlady Mrs Hudson really introduce Watson as Holmes’s new “roomie”?) The basics of the original plot are there – a cursed Mughal treasure, a beleaguered heroine who takes Watson’s fancy – but revised and spun for a contemporary eye in a way that rarely makes sense. Holmes’s investigations proceed by accident as much as deduction and often while he’s stoned to the point of overdose. Watson burbles along behind, taking notes for his next fictionalised account.
Sometimes you can see the thinking behind artistic choices – the spectacle of an escape by hot air balloon, the use of the Open Air Theatre’s rear gantries for a fight atop Tower Bridge – even if the execution is confused. The centrepiece of Grace Smart’s revolving set is a broken proscenium arch suggesting we’re at a music hall or a melodrama, but this sits oddly with Jherek Bischoff’s industrial music and Charlotte Broom’s turbulent modern choreography.
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One of the weirdest interpolations is the idea that all the animals have escaped from London Zoo. On the surface, this is a nice nod to our Regent’s Park setting, and the idea that England is losing control of its “possessions”. But Holmes (Sean, not Sherlock) puts background characters and villains in lion, rhino and elephant heads apparently at random. Is this, along with the circus sequence where a snake-headed woman sings a 1930s-style song, a nightmare of Sherlock’s chemically-altered brain? Again, it’s muddily unclear.
I usually like Joshua James’s acting but here his characterisation is relentlessly shouty and offputtingly bratty. Jyuddah Jaymes’s performance is agreeable but his Watson is often left marking time or covering up gaps in the narrative. As his love-interest Mary, Nadi Kemp-Sayfi relies on leaden emphasis and knowing side-eye. But all the performers here are strangers to subtlety.
According to Guinness World Records, Sherlock Holmes has been portrayed, adapted and interpreted more than 25,000 times across different media since Conan Doyle published A Study in Scarlet in 1887 - more than any other fictional character. Guy Ritchie is even currently having another crack with his Young Sherlock TV series, and the character has (as a programme essay for this show notes) inspired the likes of Spock, House and every maverick detective ever. He can withstand the odd duff version like this one, which I’d advise fans to skip, in the sure knowledge that there’ll be another Holmes along in a minute.
To 6 June, openairtheatre.com.
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