Writer: David Stuart Davies
Director: Gareth Armstrong
The first half of this one-man play consists mainly of a gentle wander through Holmes’ cases. The late David Stuart Davies was an acknowledged expert on Holmes and cherry picks his extracts cannily. The occasion is Dr Watson’s funeral, the date 1916, a wise choice since their last case together was a wartime exploit from 1914. Holmes has come up to London from his life as a bee-keeper in Sussex and revisits his old rooms in Baker Street, unchanged since he lived there and represented by a chair, a desk and a coat-rack.
As Holmes reminisces about his cases, he exhibits an acerbic sense of humour which Nigel Miles-Thomas brings out well. He also runs the gamut of sometimes exaggerated accents for all the characters involved – is it fourteen? – and convinces us of people and situations with minimal costume changes. He plays out brief scenes from the stories: identifying Watson as having served in Afghanistan from A Study in Scarlet is replayed several times to suggest his gradually revealed regard for Watson which he seldom manifested in the stories.
So we have extracts from Scandal in Bohemia, The Speckled Band and others unrecognised by your reviewer until we reach the interval with Holmes locked in combat with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. Gareth Armstrong who seems to have little to do at least directs Miles-Thomas in some spectacular one-man wrestling.
And so it continues after the interval except that the nature of the play subtly changes. Moriarty despatched, Holmes ventures on a period of world travel, meeting among others the Dalai Lama – did Davies forget that Watson categorised Holmes’ interest in philosophy as “nil”?
Then we depart from the classic canon as Miles-Thomas delivers with an acute sense of drama the newly invented story of Holmes’ fear of his major-general father, building up to the moment when Holmes accidentally kills him, expressed in terms that echo the death of Moriarty. A vivid snatch of The Hound of the Baskervilles follows before we come to the emotional heart of the evening.
It would be unfair to reveal the events that make the last 15 minutes of the play suddenly moving. Sufficient to say that Holmes’ need for Watson is expressed in the line, imperfectly remembered by your reviewer, “What’s the use of being unique if there is no one to record it?” Sadly, hints that Holmes would solve one last crime prove unfounded.
Reviewed on 3rd April 2025, and on tour nationwide.
