The Secret of Sherlock Holmes, Duchess Theatre

How do you construct a compelling play about the greatest of fictional detectives without either mystery or reveal? The cryptic answer, in the form of Jeremy Paul’s 1988 theatrical two-hander The Secret of Sherlock Holmes, is far from elementary.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Laudanum-quaffing, woman-hating logician Sherlock Holmes is surely the original for every heroic-cop-with-troubled-home-life that has since washed up in our fiction with whisky on his breath and murder on his mind. Clad in a paisley dressing gown, violin in hand, Holmes might colour proceedings with an inscrutable elegance, yet the flawed reality of the man himself seeps out from between every line of Conan Doyle’s stories.

This latest take on the Holmes legend strips the detective of both mystery and adversary, instead turning the questions and conundrums inward. Holmes’ uneasy relationship with his own intelligence, and that with the two emotional poles of his life – closest collaborator Watson and arch-nemesis Moriarty – come in for close scrutiny, as the play moves from whimsical period nostalgia to disturbing psychodrama with convincing ease.

There are shifts in tone and vocabulary that jar, or at any rate fail to sit comfortably with the Holmes of fiction

That it achieves all this without much by way of plot or narrative scaffolding is truly remarkable. The action (if so it may be called) is an efficient mixture of narration and direct action; the two characters move from flashback recollections, with the usual self-conscious corrections and asides, to more immediate dramatic episodes. Chief among these is a vivid recreation of the famous incident at the Reichenbach Falls, a miracle of design that leaves one particular tableau framed in the mind for hours after.

Simon Higlett’s set is gloriously and evocatively sprawling. Framed by a spiral staircase and dusty gallery (which doubles up as London’s foggy, smoky rooftops), 221B Baker Street is the ultimate bachelor pad, complete with crushed velvet chaise longue, damask curtains, scattered piles of books, and both a sabre and rifle mounted conspicuously on the walls: authentic, yet surprisingly adaptable.

Weaving quotations and dialogue from Conan Doyle’s original in amongst newly constructed passages, Jeremy Paul’s script is at times a little uneven. There are shifts in tone and vocabulary that jar, or at any rate fail to sit comfortably with the Holmes of fiction. Given the author’s notoriously laissez-faire attitude towards his imitators – “Marry him or murder him or do what you like with him” – such liberties are understandable but not perhaps strictly necessary, framed as they are here by no particular interpretational intent.

Reprising their roles from the recent The Hound of the Baskervilles are Peter Egan (Holmes) and Robert Daws (Watson). It’s a partnership whose trust and familiarity are potent, and though Egan physically lacks the saturnine menace of a Jeremy Brett or Basil Rathbone, Daws (complete with ex-military moustache) cuts a comfortingly solid figure as Watson. Egan’s Holmes, alternating “between cocaine and ambition”, is as dynamically mercurial as one could hope, and his spiralling, compulsive self-examination sits well against the achingly restrained emotion and unfussy directness of Daws’ Watson.

At the hollow core of the play is the figure of Moriarty – Holmes’ ultimate adversary. Without wishing to reveal the play’s “secret”, Paul exposes the relationship between detective and criminal as far more contingent than we might have suspected, making an elegant psychological case for a bizarrely co-dependent trio, in which the absence of Moriarty would nullify the existence of Holmes himself.

The Secret of Sherlock Holmes touches on some big questions, and if it leaves most of these tantalisingly undeveloped, it is with the deliberate artistry of a skilled storyteller. The greatest mystery currently on offer at the Duchess Theatre is why this bizarre little play works as well as it does. I was by turns entertained, amused and confounded, yet I’d defy even Holmes himself to explain why.