While inspecting the portrait gallery at Baskerville Hall, the faithful Dr Watson notes an unusual occurrence: “Holmes burst into one of his rare fits of laughter as he turned away from the picture. I have not heard him laugh often and it always boded ill.”
Instances of the great detective’s mirth are so infrequent you could almost count them. Indeed, someone already has. Leslie S Klinger’s indispensable New Annotated Sherlock Holmes draws attention to a paper by AG Cooper entitled Holmesian Humour, which calculates there are precisely 292 examples of the world’s foremost consulting detective cracking a smile.
We may deduce from this that the canon, while deeply enigmatic and irresistible to scholars, is not exactly a barrel of laughs. This is where attempts to spoof Conan Doyle’s creation tend to run aground. Holmes has been identified among the three most recognisable icons of western culture, alongside Father Christmas and Mickey Mouse. But he is not remotely a cartoon character.
Richard Hurford’s new version skirts the issue by presenting The Hound of the Baskervilles as a stock repertoire piece by “Mr Henry and Rose Dimmell’s Victorian Travelling Theatre Company”. Having never come across the redoubtable Mr Dimmell before, he does bear a striking resemblance to Mr David Leonard, the resident baddie of this parish, who delights young and old every Christmas in various villainous guises. Disorienting though it may be to witness Leonard making an entrance without a puff of green smoke, his presence signals the true intention of Damian Cruden’s family-friendly production, which is to find a way of filling the theatre in August by staging a pantomime in summer as well.
There are plenty of diversions, some of them only tangentially related to the plot, such as an airborne recital by Miss Butterfly Beryl and her Flying Cello. Composer Rob Castell supplies a jolly stream of music-hall numbers and puts in a fine turn himself as a banjo-twanging, Yankee Doodle Henry Baskerville (though the young landowner in the book is supposed to have emigrated to Canada).
How to combine such high-jinks with a comprehensible elucidation of the plot is a two-pipe problem that the production struggles to solve. It’s complicated enough that Holmes follows Watson to Dartmoor in disguise: but David Leonard playing Henry Dimmell playing Sherlock Holmes while doubling as the Baskerville’s creepy butler Barrymore could be construed as an alias too far. This is before you even begin to construct a rationale for Elexi Walker’s Watson sporting both a skirt and a moustache.
Mark Walters’s design is a real pea-souper which permits some witty interplay with shadow puppets. And as the mists close in on the desolate moor, one can visualise a man being swallowed by the perilous quicksands. As the great detective never actually said: it’s sedimentary, my dear Watson.
- At York Theatre Royal until 27 August. Box office: 01904 623568.
