Sherlock Holmes review – the game is just around the corner, a stone’s throw from Baker Street | Theater

OhOutdoor play is fun that gets disrupted by the changing weather. A day of rain for about an hour left the evening air so wet for Sherlock Holmes that the detective would have announced clearly: “It’s raining.” The flood stopped but it was so cold that the smoke and dry ice on the stage competed with the cloudy air of the actors.

Labeled as a “new mystery”, written by Joel Horwood it is a kind of bridge between Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of the Four (1890). The highlight is that we see the “real” events of Dr. Watson, passionately writing many discussions of the game in books, which were later published as the second book of Sherlock Holmes.

But although he faithfully recorded some of the cases – including the Indian Mughal jewels that were sent every year to Miss Mary Morstan in London – we see that he falsified things including the real Holmes. Watson also left out – or Horwood included – a subplot about stolen civil war secrets that didn’t reach Sherlock’s audience until the 1908 short story The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans.

This view of Watson as an unreliable narrator is one of the franchise’s modern twists that include Holmes’ belief that the British Empire was a fictitious myth and reminders that Indian jewels were stolen. The advantage of the alfresco view is a reference to the nearby London zoo, Regent’s Canal and Baker Street, although Sean Holmes’s famous movements may have been due to the actors worried about freezing on the spot.

Joshua James’s Sherlock, the underdog, has some legitimate features, including a pipe and medical equipment, but he eagerly embraces ideas about the detective’s sexuality and brain diversity that previous actors have only dabbled with. As Horwood observes Holmes’ outburst – “The mud on your shoe is only found in court!” – there are streams of thought that James clearly conveys. Jyuddah Jaymes eagerly takes advantage of the opportunity presented by Watson whose agency and intelligence have been expanded from her Conan Doyle role of a fantasy writer.

Famous people who don’t have their own rights are often subject to gossip but, in all the horrors like Sherlock Holmes and Alien Abduction, the independent artist has had a chance. Like Humphrey Ker and David Reed’s Sherlock Holmes and the 12 Days of Christmas last year at the Birmingham Rep, Horwood’s version manages to simultaneously laugh and imitate the original.