Review: Sherlock Holmes: The Hunt for Moriarty at Cast Doncaster

“…a real love letter to Conan Doyle and his fans…”

Sherlock Holmes: The Hunt for Moriarty by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle adapted by Nick Lane, Cast Doncaster

By Sean Sable

I am a professional woman of mystery. In my real-life secret identity, I am a writer and fiction editor whose primary genre is mystery. My day-to-day existence can be diagrammed on a corkboard covered in red strings and no bad guy under a mask will escape my detection. In fact, for the last twenty years, the game has never stopped being afoot. So, when the opportunity to visit my colleague Sherlock Holmes on stage comes up, the clues only point in one direction.

The Hunt for Moriarty is Blackeyed Theatre’s third adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s work, and there’s a lovely local symmetry to it landing at Cast, as writer-director Nick Lane is Doncaster-born and raised. Rather than adapting a single novel, Lane has stitched together several of Doyle’s short stories—A Scandal in Bohemia, The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans, The Adventure of the Second Stain, and The Final Problem—into one continuous meta-mystery. We are whisked away to London, 1901, and a shadowy conspiracy is ripping at the seams of government and monarchy alike. Holmes and Watson find themselves unsure who to trust, circling an old adversary waiting in the shadows. As someone who has read every Sherlock Holmes mystery, I was delighted by how much of Doyle’s flavour survived the transplant. From the clipped, forward-leaning energy of the prose to the dry repartee between Watson and Holmes, I felt squarely inside the pages of my favourite short stories. That said, Lane has allowed the script a little more of a knowing wink than the stories themselves usually permit, an instinct I thought worked well. After all, he knows what we Baker Street Irregulars really want: to feel part of the team.

Victoria Spearing’s set is a three-sided convertible construction, beginning in a burnt-out 221B Baker Street complete with dark red, fire-marked walls. It’s ingenious in concept: walls flip on hinges, and furniture gets rearranged, remaking itself into a succession of locations across two acts. My one frustration was that the base set, striking as it was, never quite felt lived in. No pot plants. No sense of soft furnishings. It was atmosphere sans domesticity. And because it started without a clear sense of somewhere specific, stripping it back for other scenes didn’t produce the sensation of arriving somewhere new. I kept feeling like I’d never really left Baker Street, even when I was allegedly in a men’s club or beside a railway. I wanted wallpaper. I wanted clutter. That way, when they disappeared, I could sense I was firmly somewhere else.

Oliver Welsh’s lighting did excellent work throughout, and there were definitely moments where his sense of light and shadow tickled my mystery bone. Silhouettes cast through doorways as characters approached, stretched against the set walls, gave the production a fantastic gothic atmosphere. At one point, a caretaker appeared with a raised lantern and an oddly affected voice, ready to take us somewhere unlit and ominous. And in that moment, I was living my best Scooby-Doo life.

Projection designer Mark Hooper added another layer, throwing text and images onto the back wall, which reminded me of the BBC Sherlock‘s on-screen typography tricks— a device that felt genuinely revolutionary when the show first aired. Unfortunately, the execution was occasionally awkward where the projections competed with the set’s architectural features. In such a twisty-turny mystery, where we are asked to absorb a lot of details at speed, I would have just loved a little more clarity there.

Tristan Parkes’ sound design was a real joy in places. During the scene changes, we were treated to jazzy, propulsive scene-change music ripped straight from the golden-age of mystery (or possibly from my personal soundtrack). I was delighted by the addition of rich, ambient train and crowd effects that really filled out the production space. That said, those of us at the back of the theatre had a rather practical problem: amplification. From the back of the stalls, I (and what seemed like most of the row around me) spent a fair portion of the first act asking each other what had just been said. I’m unsure if this was a technical snag, or simply the result of Holmesian speech unsupported by sufficiently clear sound. Either way, it left us leaning forward and cupping our ears.

Mark Knightley’s Holmes is composed, with small moments of manic energy (very much in the tradition of Basil Rathbone) and I found his depiction a refreshing change from the more modern Cumberbatch/Downey Jr. portrayals. Ben Owora’s Watson is warm and reliable, with soft Scottish colouring to some of his lines that I found rather appealing. Pippa Caddick juggled a considerable workload across all the female roles, and for the most part navigated the switches well.  Her Mrs Hudson is a genuine contributor to the investigation rather than a tea-delivery service—a refreshing change. My only niggle was her accent for Irene Adler (an attempt at a non-regional American), which hit the target sideways at times.

It says so much that nearly a century after the death of his author, Sherlock Holmes manages to maintain a grip on the world’s imagination. We can never get enough. We want more stories, new stories, new interpretations to fill an insatiable appetite. Sherlock Holmes: The Hunt for Moriarty is a real love letter to Conan Doyle and his fans. It wants to give us something generous and twisty and faithful to the spirit of “the game” and it nearly always gets its man.   

Sherlock Holmes: The Hunt for Moriarty plays at Cast Doncaster until Wednesday 18 March. Tickets are available here.

Sean Sable is a Yorkshire-based freelance writer and editor specialising in Young Adult and Horror fiction, frequently at the same time. When she isn’t buried under a pile of books and manuscripts, she is looking for her keys and having extensive one-sided conversations, in Swedish, with her deaf cat. You can find her online at: www.seansable.co.uk