Sherlock Holmes: The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle adapted by Nick Lane. Southwark Playhouse, the Large, 77 Newington Causeway, London SE1 to 15 April 2024 & at the Theatre Royal Bath from 16th to 20th April 2024.

2✩✩ Review: William Russell.

“The real mystery is why this Conan Doyle novel was made into a play.”

The fourth and last Holmes novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle makes a complicated and tedious play a state of affairs not helped by it having a cast of only six who are required to play multiple roles in two different story lines and by and large fail to be sufficiently different which leads to confusion. It is indeed hard to fathom what tempted Black Eyed Theatre’s Nick Lane, who also directs, to adapt it for the stage let alone why it apparently enjoyed wide success when first performed last year. The trouble is that we first meet Sherlock and Watson puzzling over a mysterious letter in code which turns out to be an invitation to solve a murder of a man in a moated grange with a priests hole. But no sooner than that is solved and we have realised the Sherlock and Watson are having a fraternal problem – Watson is now married to his Mary – than we are whisked to Pensylvnania ‘s Vermissa Valley where gangs have been terrorising the locals apparently inspired by Professor Moriarty to meet a whole lot of new characters who, give or take a gun or two, look exactly like the people we have just met in Baker Street. Moriarty even turns up when Sherlock is visiting an art exhibition for the pair to have a somewhat gnomic discussion about art. It turns out that one of the people in Pennsylvania was an undercover Pinkerton detective who, faced with death on being rumbled, has fled to England and obscurity. It adds up to a lot of confused nonsense and nothing the cast, all of whom work very hard indeed, can make the goings on comprehensible while, not only is he too young for Sherlock, Bobby Bradley never convinces that there is a mastermind at work. This does not help matters, nor that the hapless Alice Osmanski as well as playing among several Mrs Hudson has to play a police office in the valley out to get the bad guys, one of whom is played by Bobby Bradley. With all the roles filled individually it is just possible that something could be made out of the novel but this time round all we get is confusion compounded by confusion. It has already been seen in Finchley, Dundee and Derby and after this stint in Southwark is off to the theatre Royal in Bath from April 16 to 20.

Cast

Bobby Bradley – Sherlock Holmes.

Joseph Derrington – Dr John Watson when with a stick, not when without.

Blake Kubena – Jack McMurdo, Detective White-Mason, Jack McGinty, Cecil Barker, Moriarty.

Gavin Molloy – Inspector McDonald.

Alice Osmanski – Ettie Shafter, Mrs Hudson, Ivy Douglas, Captain Marvin.

Creatives

Director – Nick Lane.

Composer – Tristan Parks.

Set Designer – Victoria Spearing.

Lighting Designer – Oliver Welsh.

Costume Designer – Naomi Gibbs.

Action Designer – Robert Myles.