Breaking news from the first plummy-voiced radio transmissions of 1922: James Watson, son of the rugby-playing soldier-turned-medic Doctor Watson (Timothy Kightley), is dead; the unlucky recipient of a stray bullet in the fag end of the Great War.

Said Boswell to Holmes’s Johnson is as good as dead to his estranged wife Mary (Liza Goddard), even though they continue to live under the same roof of two twenty-one B Baker Street where he has swapped general practice for the revolutionary theory of psychoanalysis.

And the retired bee-keeping sleuth with the unconvincing nom de plume Sherlock Smith (Robert Powell) instructs Mary to think of him as dead as he retires to a secluded beach on the South Coast in order to prevent a “nest of vipers” from avenging the death of his nemesis and “equal” Professor Moriarty.

The same private beach upon which a short-haired woman in short trousers is found short of breath thirty years to the day since Moriarty checked out in Switzerland – not from a Dignitas clinic, but at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls after an altercation with former boxer Holmes.

Death is in the air – literally, as James Watson’s ghost makes a surprise appearance above his parents’ fireplace – and deathly slow are the opening scenes under the directorship of David Grindley, which are marked with static exchanges and glacial scene-changes involving the long, slow draw of a “final curtain” which crawls from left to right and back again like a sloth.

Thankfully, as playwright Simon Reade reveals his winning hand one suited face card at a time, and as the ten-strong cast spearheaded by the poker-faced Robert Powell sink their teeth into the dry one-liners and weary ruminations about mortality before arm-wrestling the conundrum of Professor Moriarty and James Watson’s deaths into submission, the pace quickens, the mood lightens and the final curtain finally falls to a polite and appreciative round of applause.

Think a single at cricket before tea, rather than a pavilion-clearing six.

Peter Callaghan
Latest posts by Peter Callaghan (see all)