Here’s the scene: a dark and shadowy street with strands of London fog drifting in and out, a lamp post, a bobby strolling through, a variety of street-world English accents, and a voice that shouts the news of Sherlock Holmes’ death. Next a few words from Doctor Watson, the play’s narrator, and we flashback with scene change to the study of the famous detective where he listens with ears and heart to an operatic soprano on a cylinder –and I bet you don’t remember those.
Holmes offers a slew of quick observations regarding his associate –that he has gained seven and a half pounds, has moved his shaving table, has a clumsy servant girl – and concludes with, “You see but you do not observe.” We, in our turn, observe that he is smitten with the singer. When he gets to meet her, not long after, he speaks haltingly and awkwardly and with breathy urgency, for hers is “a face a man might die for.”
The ensuing dramatic narrative of the play, we soon discover, is actually a blending of two plots. One involves the King of Bohemia who explains, “The scandal of my life involves that voice.” It turns out that the King was “romantically entangled” with the opera singer Irene Adler and now, on the verge of marriage, must retrieve love letters and a compromising photograph before they fall into hostile hands. The second plot involves the life-threatening presence of Holmes’ eternal rival, Professor Moriarty, and we know there’s a waterfall in their cards.
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Steven Sutcliffe as Holmes has a readily ignited instinct for melodramatic cadences. His insinuating voice is rich with a comic self-indulgence that goes oratorical and judgmental in a snap. His Sherlock is finicky in manner, condescending in tone, and approaches every possibility with a boyish gusto. He enunciates in broad sweeps and speaks in pockets of resonance or with prickish understatement. He is charming.
But the casting of this splendid entertainment provides several humorously melodramatic individuals, and each distinct voice gives this production a symphonic variety in sound. Peter Krantz, as the King of Bohemia, for one, speaks with a gruff authority and a blustery roar that punctuates the atmosphere and the play’s headlong pace.
As Moriarty, Thom Marriott is a tall, darkly brooding presence who glides regally in his steps and speaks with solid, commanding and measured delivery. He is elegantly dignified in attire, without a crease. He is a thinking villain, one with a beard he strokes in moments of deep and evil thoughts. His disposal of implicating witnesses keeps him untouchable. Another gem of a performance in the group of conniving criminals in Cliff Saunders as Sid Prince, a cheeky safe cracker with attitude and a nicely shaped Cockney.
accent.
Doctor Watson, on more than one occasion negated as a bumbler elsewhere, is here made a quietly complex creation by Clive Walton. He’s a slightly stooped, linear figure who speaks like a professional and a man of the streets. He is rough-edged and sufficiently slow in keeping pace in detection of details, which allows Holmes, in turn, to dazzle. This Doctor Watson is slightly seedy and rumpled in manner, certainly a compellingly defined character with a real life hidden in his pocket. One keeps wondering about him.
As Irene Adler, Ieva Lucs has a perky, contemporary, and not too worldly quality that plays sunshine to the production’s often brooding setting. She’s a charming creation who speaks her emotions with a pleasant ringing clarity and delivers one of the play’s ace lines: “I have shot tenors, James, and after that a woman can shoot anything!”
This briskly melodramtic production, with its many amusing points concisely made, is directed for sprightly precision by Marcia Kash. She maintains a tone of very refined agitation, something that one may not notice save for one’s constant chuckles in response to it. She ably realizes the comic potential of each scene and delights in lightly maneuvered exaggerations of manner and propriety.
Shawn Kerwin’s involving set, in which the era is here detailed and there simply suggested, provides a physical context for both Edwardian stodginess and crisp narrative momentum. We suffocate in close quarters and then we run frantically along with the story.
The Final Adventure is concisely written, with the text carefully informative as it sends the plot moving ahead in quick leaps. It is an adaptation by Steven Dietz of the once immensely popular play by actor William Gillette and Arthur Conan Doyle. Some scenes certainly take liberties with the canon, even demystify Holmes, but if you suspend your loyalty to the original stories, you’ll thus have much here to enjoy.
Imagine Holmes and Adler youngishly making plans together, although she informs him that “a woman can never be solved.” Imagine the woman-inept Holmes in a lover’s spat where Irene is irritated by his talking about pipes when she wants “evidence of his heart.” And Holmes, though not woman-savvy – he even asks, “What is a man to say?”- does briefly show signs of a heartfelt wooer. Imagine that!
Whether anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Doyle can believe, accept, or even imagine such a Holmes is, of course, the issue temporarily on the shelf. In the meantime, however, this production is pure delight throughout. And it’s on view, appropriately, in London’s Grand Theatre, a “Victorian style theatre, built in the Edwardian era.”