Nice Atmosphere, Shame About the Show
Sherlock Holmes (Regent's Park Open Air Theatre) - Guest Review by Dr Terror
Okay: let's cover the good stuff first. The open air theatre in Regent's Park is wonderful, as is the rest of Regent's Park...particularly at this time of year with the spring flowers in bloom and the nights getting shorter and shorter. The park is the only place in central London (which has more parks than any other capital) where hedgehogs thrive. How special is that? In my past visits, the theatre has unveiled Joe Stilgoe singing movie songs at the piano, one of the most vibrant productions of Little Shop of Horrors and, by annual tradition (much like a star playing Scrooge in Jack Thorne's adaptation of A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic every year), an enchanting production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In fact it was playing Bottom in one of these that Patrick Wymark was spotted and offered the role of John Wilder: from rude mechanicals to aero engineers. And now the theatre is also home to this shit..
I liked Marcia Lecky as Mrs Hudson and I could just about stomach Jyuddah James as Watson (overconfident and irritating though he was). Will Brown played Lestrade like a complete prick, Patrick Warner's Mycroft came across as a strange hybrid of Chris Langham and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. And Sherlock himself? Saints preserve us! Holmes is the best-known and most interpreted and reinterpreted character this country has produced (way ahead of even Dracula, Harry Potter and James Bond). We've seen lots and lots of Sherlocks over the years...but have we ever seen one done like Rik Mayall in The Young Ones? Well, we have now.
Who'd have thought that, a stone's throw from Baker Street itself and the somewhat ersatz Sherlock Holmes Museum and Gift Shop (I much prefer the pub, between Trafalgar Square and Hungerford Bridge), we could be witnessing a Sherlock so drug-crazed that he's about to start hitting Vyvyan with a crowbar?
Meanwhile, the stage looks lovely and the vibe enhances your other senses: the smell of gunpowder is intoxicating (there is a lot of it). I keep coming back to this because it almost mitigates the dire shambles being performed. The fact that it is billed as 'A new Sherlock Holmes adventure' but the entire first half is The Sign of Four (which I recently saw performed much better at the Epsom Playhouse - see review ) doesn't help, especially as it solves the mystery for you in the first couple of minutes instead of...er...at the end?
In the second half, they try to do something different with it but my spirit was crushed by then and it really didn't work (you're right: Mycroft wasn't in The Sign of Four Well spotted.) A ruthless critic once said of a Broadway show that he went out humming the scenery. This was worse: I came out humming the auditorium...and it wasn't even a musical, though this doesn't stop them trying some modern dance at the start of the proceedings.
Stay away...but have yourselves a picnic in Regent's Park instead. It's great.