Review: Sherlock Holmes at Kingston's Rose Theatre

2 STARS, May 14-19. An intriguing premise is let down by a thin and implausible plot, says Alice Cairns

Going into Sherlock Holmes: The Final Curtain, Holmesian purists are bound to have a lot of questions – chief amongst them, why is Mary Watson, a character very neatly dispatched by Conan Doyle, still hanging around? And why is a magic consultant listed in the programme?

The story is narrated by none other than Dr Watson, who has embraced modern technology and is now reading his stories aloud to a radio audience. At the opening of this particular narrative, Sherlock Holmes has retired. He’s now a beekeeper on the Sussex coast, brooding over his hives under the assumed identity of Mr. Sherlock Smith. His isolation is broken on the 30th anniversary of Moriarty’s death, when a corpse – a woman dressed in man’s clothing, no less – is washed up on the shore of his private beach. Hours later Mary Watson appears on his doorstep, demanding that he return to 221B Baker Street where she and her estranged husband are being haunted by the spectre of their soldier son. The game is well and truly afoot!

Sherlock Holmes is a character who lived on almost in spite of his creator – a man who rose from the dead after the Reichenbach Falls, and who’s been endlessly resurrected as everything from the fast-talking sociopath of Sherlock to the intellectual action man of the Robert Downey Jr. blockbusters. It’s possible that The Final Curtain intended to engage critically with the shapeshifting mythology of the Holmes stories, and with the Holmes-Watson partnership in particular. Just when you think the play has ended, there’s a curious little scene that hints that the cosy, masculine insularity of Holmes and Watson’s friendship is a kind of boys club that excludes women. After all, these are stories in which a once treasured wife can be killed off in a few lines, and in which Holmes repeatedly states that he dislikes and distrusts the entire female sex.

But these ideas aren’t really integrated into the rest of the play, and the ending felt like an odd little postscript stuck on the end to lend thematic depth. It’s hard to discuss this without giving anything away, but it’s safe to say that by the end of the play the friendship between Holmes and Watson has been reestablished as though a number of seriously traumatic events didn’t happen – Watson remains remarkably jolly under a set of circumstances that would have had most men clamouring for some pretty intense counselling.

There was also a fair amount of gentle meta-theatre – references to villains ‘waiting in the wings’, characters who are chastised for sounding like a demented actor on the stage… even the title of the play, ‘the final curtain’, seems to be some kind of reference to the theatre. But if there was some deeper point here about theatricality, it eluded me.

Anyway, whatever the intentions of this play, I would say that it failed to deliver. Unless you’re an extremely charitable viewer, the mystery plot seems thin and wildly implausible. The idea of Holmes growing old is an interesting one, but it’s one that feels insufficiently tackled in this production. Although he complains eloquently about his age, this Holmes never seems to be limited in any practical sense – he’s still able to investigate a corpse with his magnifying glass, or set up an elaborate trap using only fly fishing equipment. I was put in mind of a fairly harrowing Mitchell and Webb sketch on the same theme that delved much more deeply into the concept of an ageing Holmes. The play also includes elements of Conan Doyle’s infamous interest in the supernatural, but again the treatment feels a little superficial (although a scene involving a levitating table and a sudden flash of light did draw screams from the audience).

Not only this, but the play feels rather clunkily executed in parts – the set changes could certainly be streamlined, and the audience has a clear view of props through the huge window that dominates part of the stage.

There are some good performances: Timothy Knightley is strong as a spritely Watson who’s moved with the times, and is now overwhelmed with enthusiasm for mechanical gadgets and the modern science of psychoanalysis. Lisa Goddard is dignified as Mary Watson, and Roy Sampson gives us a witty and wiry Mycroft. Robert Powell was certainly competent as Holmes himself, although I couldn’t help but feel his heart wasn’t in it. Another actor could have made us fear for Holmes as he descended increasingly into paranoia, jumping at shadows and brandishing a revolver. But Powell’s performance is calm and rather one-dimensional – we don’t glimpse anything erratic or dark about this genius.

It’s a play that had all kinds of interesting material to play with, but which produced something even thinner and more unlikely than Conan Doyle’s very silliest plots (The Speckled Band, anyone?) All in all, an implausible script that was only partially redeemed by its competent cast.

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