Lucy Talbot as Dr Watson, Gareth May
as Sherlock Holmes and Joshua Gallagher as Sir Henry Baskerville
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Grange Playhouse
*****
Terror comes in many forms, and this
dramatisation of Sherlock Holmes’s celebrated and most shocking of cases
brings its own chilling fear to any who witness it . . . mainly a fear
of chuckling to death, or even worse, leaking with laughter . . . . Who
knew Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, to give him his Sunday name, had
such a bent for comedy!
With freezing temperatures, gas bills rivalling
mortgages, and a war-torn world in floods and flames, we really do need
a moment of escape, a chance to laugh to forget the gloom for while, and
this does the job beautifully, pure comedy gold.
The tale is simple with a hell hound roaming the
wilds of Dartmoor frightening the congenitally feeble hearted
Baskerville clan into a fatal state of cardiac arrest one by one . . .
it’s actually the same Baskerville bloke each time but we’ll let that
pass, so Holmes and Watson hotfoot it down to Dartmoo (sic) to solve the
. . .whatever.
In truth there is more of The Goons than gloom
about this production and if you knew nothing of the story when you
arrived, your knowledge will remain pretty much unsullied by anything
that happens by the time you leave, but by golly you will have had a
laugh – about one a minute at a rough estimate.
The 15 or so characters are played by a cast of
three with Gareth May in the lead (lead in the loosest sense of the word
here) role of Sherlock Holmes, his detective showing a level of
pomposity worthy of an Arts Council grant.
May also pops up as the Baskerville’s ancient
retainer Barrymore and his wife Mrs Barrymore, who seems to be Mr
Barrymore with an upturned beard . . . He is also the mysterious,
crippled, becrutched and eye-patched foreign accented naturalist Mr
Stapleton as well as his sister - or maybe wife - the Spanish femme(ish)
fatale Cecile who could easily be mistaken for a zero hours occasional
flamenco dancer from a Benidorm working men’s cch . . . lub. He or she,
depending upon whether a fan is involved, is also a railway guard, an
old woman on a train and some mad besmocked yokel.
Gareth May as Mrs Barrymore, Dr Watson
and Sir Henry with a window on the world of the Moo
It is his first, or perhaps in his case, these,
are his first appearances at Grange although he is no stranger to
treading the boards, we having reviewed him regularly in the past at
Dudley Little Theatre. He provides the love interest . . . times was
hard in 19th century Devon . . . with a tango that wouldn’t look out of
place on Strictly (Ann Widdecombe era) with Sir Henry, of which
more later.
Another debutante is Lucy Talbot who gives us an
enthusiastic, if intellectually limited Dr Watson, and as she is on
stage Watsoning much of the time, she only has time to fit in a local
yokel on Dartmoo (sic) on top of her day job.
A well known singer/songwriter she is no stranger
to performing around the West Midlands and you would never guess this
was her theatrical debut - ducks and water springs to mind - along with
May she adds to the burgeoning talent available at the Playhouse.
Joshua Gallagher is another seasoned performer
who first appeared at the Grange in Accomplice back in 2023. He
first arrives on stage as Dr James Mortimer, Sir Charles Baskerville’s
great, and if we are honest, somewhat eccentric, verging on mad, friend.
He is also Sir Charles but as he is dead we won’t count that.
Now Sir Charles looks, or now he is dead again,
looked remarkably like his nephew Sir Henry Baskerville, also played by
Gallagher, last of the Baskerville line and heir of the Baskerville
estate and fortune and in grave danger of being the end of the line. He
falls for Cecile in a doomed love affair which shows love is blind . . .
and so, it seems, is Sir Henry.
His Sir Henry is Canadian and remarkably camp,
not that Sir Henry was camp mind, after all this is 1889, but Gallagher
explained he couldn’t do a Canadian accent, so he had to do something
different. C’est la vie as they say in Quebec.
Gallagher also had a mortal fear of the sound of
a giant hound capable of ripping flesh from the bones of anyone found
alone on the mist enshrouded moor, or, in this case, the stage of the
Playhouse, so the standard sound effects of (dramatic music) the howling
of The Hound of the Baskervilles, turned him into a gibbering
wreck which brought Act I to a gibbering halt.
He also swans up as a London cabbie, Guv, fag in
the corner of his mouth, a banjo playing Dartmoo (sic) yokel with a hint
of Dueling Banjos, another yokel selling a dead lamb in a bag – don’t
ask – and a dead bloke at the beginning who was not part of the play so
we’ll leave him out to avoid confusion.
The classic detective team . . . Holmes
and Watson
Just about every comedy trick in the book was
utilised by the wonderful cast and their director Rod Bissett and they
avoided any dragging moments, that killer of comedy, by keeping up a
cracking pace. Not everything worked, classic comedy isn’t like that,
but the laughs come so thick and fast any misfires are drowned out by
the next guffaw.
The trio showed superb timing, the one aspect of
comedy that cannot be taught, it’s instinctive, you either have it or
you don’t, and you have to admire the rehearsal hours that must have
gone in for the scores of costume changes, entrances and exits to make
it flow so well.
We even had the first act twice. Some bloke in
the audience, another Roger Clarke apparently – everyone’s a critic
these days – had tweeted some disparaging remarks during the interval
about May’s performance. How this bloke managed to get a wifi signal at
the Playhouse is a mystery in itself, but we’ll let that pass.
Anyhow it meant we had to sit through the entire
first act again – thankfully it only took about three minutes, and,
let’s be honest, it was helpful for older members of the audience where
a break of 15 minutes means the first act might as well never have
happened. Has it started yet, Nurse?
The set design by Bissett is . . . well a
painting of the moor filling the stage back. That’s it. While the props
from Bissett and Mark Natrass are minimal but so effective at garnering
laughs. We have the RoRo door, Rocky Horror style upright bed, a
fireplace on castors, a chair, a couple of benches for a train, taxi or
steam room, a Dartmoo (sic) sign and a dead body who can be anybody you
want dead – only characters in the play before you get any ideas.
Then there is the picture frame which displays
the entire Baskerville line, sort of, who all look a bit like Gallagher,
sort of. The play was adapted by John Nicholson and Steven Canny back in
2007, both having writing credits for radio and there is that feel about
the play which mixes visual madcap comedy with clever dialogue, the
hallmark of radio comedy.
If you enjoyed the four man version of The 39
Steps then you will love this, the energy levels are kept up to a
Spinal Tap 11 level to the end and for any Sherlock Holmes fans, this is
an affectionate take on the classic tale, at times hilarious, gloriously
daft, clever, inventive and thoroughly enjoyable, and all done without
an "Elementary my dear Watson" anywhere in sight! Sadly we don't have
the space to tell you who dunnit but it is roaming the Moo to 18-01-25.
Roger Clarke
(a different one than the one that
tweeted)
09-01-25
|
