The Secret of Sherlock Holmes

Last night we went to see The Secret of  Sherlock Holmes at the King’s, Edinburgh.  Distressingly, the theatre was half empty - distressing because the play deserved better for the cast alone: Peter Egan as Holmes and Philip Franks as Watson.  The play was excellent: an excellent script (Jeremy Paul), excellent set (Simon Higlett) and a superlative performance by Egan and Franks, whose pairing had the same comfortable familiarity as Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in Waiting for Godot.  Solid familiarity proves important for Holmes and Watson for the same reason as it is important for Vladimir and Estragon: fallings out needed to be convincingly intense but temporary.   

The play concerns the friendship between Holmes and Watson – how they met initially, why they continued to associate and in particular, the nature of Holmes’ dependence on Watson.  Franks’ Watson is interesting – guilelessness, sincerity and gratitude are woven into the more usual representation of him as guardian of Holmes’ arrogant and  wilful brilliance.  Holmes’s character has more melodrama, naturally, and more predictability.  However, this is not to detract from the play or the performance.  Both the extension of the narrative tale to embrace how the pair met initially, and the portrayal of Watson’s response to Holmes’s seeming resurrection after Reichenbach Falls are pleasingly credible.  I have no idea how fans of Holmes’s casebook would react to the play; as someone  who is familiar enough with the stories to be able to nod with approval at the plausibility of the reconstruction, and chuckle with delight at  Paul’s discrete display of his erudition (Watsons's catalogue of Holmes’ failings is particularly pleasing), the play was rivetting.

I loved the set, and Robin Herford’s use of the space.  The incorporation both the London skyline and the Reichenbach Falls into a set predominantly comprising 221 Baker Street is masterful; Holmes’ disappearance at Reichenbach Falls is striking, and the use of the residual smoke during Watson’s elegy for his dead friend is clever.   Sound was cleverly used too, but, Reichenbach aside, I found the lighting poor, as, all too often, it cast the characters’ features too sharply into into shadow.   The presence of a signer for benefit of the deaf was, at times, frankly irritating.  Indeed it is difficult to see how the deaf can have benefited, as they seemed to have been forced to choose between watching either the play or the signer, and, given how much meaning was added to the script by the actors’ body language, being confined to an either-or will have detracted enormously  from the experience.