The Butcher, the Baker, the Murder Partaker
The Sign of Four (Epsom Playhouse and national tour) Guest Review by Dr Terror
It was no surprise that Doctor Who fans of a certain age were out in force for this one, one of those plays where you are a fly on the wall at a radio station where a bunch of actors voices an adventure, here based on the well-known Sherlock Holmes novel.
If you know what happens in The Sign of Four, you'll be thinking that it won't be easy to stage but, with a radio play, many such problems melt away. It is tempting to shut your eyes and make it even better, though you get a niggling feeling that you're not getting your money's worth of you do. As for the Who groupies, Sherlock Holmes is played by Colin Baker, the sixth Doctor, hardly the personification of those Strand magazine illustrations, but his voice is just right!
In fact, you might already be used to shutting your eyes when he speaks from back in his Doctor Who days and that horrific multicoloured costume that his controversial producer John Nathan-Turner (himself a wearer of psychedelic Hawaiian shirts) forced him to don. As for Watson, young and in love (no, no - not with Sherlock!), elderly character actor Terry Molloy - the programme's go-to Davros - might not be quite how you imagined him, but again the voice is a winner.
The supporting parts and sound effects from a good, old fashioned 'Foley desk' are spot on too, not least when the actors are playing the cheeky Baker Street Irregulars and the sound effects are simulating and escaping boat. I would love to say that this is the perfect night out, but I do have a quibble...
The troupe putting this on call themselves the Crime and Comedy Theatre Company and, fine though Kate Ashmead's production was, I felt that there was simply not enough of the latter. Now, it's true that Conan Doyle was not a comic writer so comparison with other staged radio plays like Round the Horne or - perhaps nearer to the subject matter - Murder Most Foley would not be fair, but the team could have taken a few lessons from Murder on Air.
Murder on Air was staged a (good) few years ago by the Agatha Christie Theatre Company, given to touring but docking at the Theatre Royal in Windsor. It too took the ' you're watching a radio play being staged' format for three relatively obscure half-hour adventures but got a lot of laughs from the sheer inventiveness of the Foley desk's sound effects production. The final playlet, Butter in a Lordly Dish, featured a character getting a nail hammered into their skull, performed with indecent enthusiasm using a watermelon.
Oh, for some of that wacky creativity here!