With a plinkety-plonkety recording of “How much is that doggy in the window?” raising a smile pre-show, you’d be forgiven for expecting a lighthearted take of Arthur Conan Doyle’s shaggiest of shaggy dog stories (his third of only four crime novels featuring the pipe-smoking detective and his tweed-suited sidekick which was first serialised in The Strand Magazine at the turn of the twentieth century).

But a clap of thunder and a bolt of lightning, together with high-pitched shrieks of “It’s too late, it’s too late” bursts that bubble in an instant. As does Jeremy Bradfield’s jangling score and Amy Watts’ jarring set comprising a mouldy banquet table shorn of two legs, upon which is unveiled a miniature mansion against an expansive gauze through which red eyes bore, skulls impress and a wash of colours by Michael Morgan taint the heavy fog with menace.

It’s Sherlock, Jim, but not as we know it, in Douglas Maxwell’s nigh on two-hour-long adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles in a touring production for Northern Stage directed with pace and energy by Jake Smith, artistic director of the Petersfield Shakespeare Festival, who succeeds in his pre-production hope “to shake off any dust” from Arthur Conan Doyle’s self-proclaimed “Victorian creeper”.

Credit to the hard-working and versatile ensemble of four, doubling up (numerically and physically) in a multitude of eccentric roles. Some of the costume changes of which are so fast they would give a panto dame a run for her spondoolicks. And credit, too, for the ease with which they devour some of the longer passages of detailed narration. Particularly Jake Wilson Craw as Dr Watson who carries the bulk of the show with great charm and confidence – the straight-as-a-die foil to James Gladdon’s frenzied Sherlock Holmes who at the top of the show clutches a bottle of plonk and drinks himself under the table!

It may lack the chill in the air of a spooky ghost story, the emotional undercurrents of a meaty drama and the ratcheting up of tension of a gripping mystery, but it’s a taut adaptation directed with boldness and performed with great gusto by a fine ensemble of “local, emerging actors” (including Rebecca Tebbett and Siobhan Stanley) who form part of a three-strand training programme by Northern Stage. The motto of which, much like this production, “reaches beyond the ordinary”.

Peter Callaghan
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