Berkshires arts reviews

Sept. 28, 2007 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

With the summer season of Shakespeare plays over, the Founders’ Theatre has for the current production of Jeremy Paul’s “The Secret of Sherlock Holmes” been reconfigured into a proscenium-type theatre with stage spanning the back wall and audience seating replacing the thrust stage area.

Set designer Paulo Seixas’s ingenious use of the space provides a cramped Victorian abode for Watson stage right and a more ample one for Holmes stage left with the space between the two becoming the streets that adjoin them.

This configuration alone makes for some telling staging, at the same time realistic and symbolic, but is only the beginning, what we see before the play starts.

Lights on the opening illuminate the London skyline, rising across the houses, still in darkness and violin music throbs as on the high screen above Holmes house a huge projection of the violinist wavers, to fade as the music does. Darkness. Then lights up on Watson, sitting at his desk, and the play can begin.

This deliberately long description of the setting is to point out how meticulously every aspect of this two character play can fill a stage with action. As stylized as a brief scene in which each man dons his Victorian street wear (Holmes in top hat; the humbler Watson, his derby—costumes Govane Lohbauer) and each exits his door, each appears on “his” street”, each walk downs it and meets for a scene on the forestage—that results in Watson’s move into sharing Holmes flat at 22 Baker Street

Every aspect of that short, light and humorous scene, staged by director Robert Walsh, is exactly right and if you happen to be a Holmes fan may even recognize that most of the words they speak are drawn from the pages of their creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Because this two act play is largely made up of scene after scene between the two men, so different in character, but so vitally created, that given two brilliant actors, as this play has been given, the play tells us so much more about each of the men than all the films and TV series, which concentrated on ingeniously solved crimes, had little room for.

This play has characters who not only enchant but intrigue. Michael Hammond gives us a Holmes who is mercurial, domineering, eccentric, insightful, charismatic, and at the same time often deeply depressed, full of suppressed emotions. His towering intellect lets him solve problems with ease. His inner anger at much of his world makes him dependent on the drugs that his friend Watson deplores but can not wean him from.

Watson is no match for him in the battle of wits but has his own kind of courage, his own views on morality. He has fought in war, has dealt with poverty and loss, is horrified at Holmes 7% solution addiction, but is scathingly reminded by Holmes when he offers assistance that he is “only a G P”. As played dynamically by Dave Demke, this Watson is no Teddy bear but a loyal, if not very quick witted friend.

And it is this friendship, this a-sexual male bonding between two Victorian friends that is at the heart of the play. Watson is the one man to whom Holmes can really talk, even though at times his meanings may not quite make it to Watson. Holmes is the one man in the world whom Watson can admire to idolatry, whom he can support by writing up Holmes brilliant adventures.

Hammond and Demke play off each other brilliantly, balancing each other and for all their differences in economic backgrounds, education and intelligence each needing the other.

In Act I, the scenes between the two men are usually brief ones, at times interspersed with monologs. The time period relating to the Holmes “cases”covers all the first round of Doyle’s brilliant tales with lines drawn from many of them.

The scene break for Act II comes at that crucial moment in the career of Sir Arthur Doyle himself at which time he decided to “kill” Holmes and free himself from the bondage of writing any more about him.

However as the world knows, the public would not stand for the disappearance of Holmes and after a three year hiatus, Holmes had to return.

Act one ends with that dramatic moment in Switzerland at Reichenbach Fell when Holmes’ enemy Moriarty pushes him over the falls. This performance at that point makes use again of the upstage screen for a projection of the tragic demise.

This leaves the play open for the second act to cover in great and splendidly performed delivery, one of Doyle’s best and longest scenes between the two men as Holmes recounts to Watson his miraculous escape and the reasons for his long absence from the friend who mourned him.

Watson can scarcely forgive the agony Holmes has made him suffer, but forgives as in the rich material of the second act the bonding continues, and Holmes shares, as far as he can bring himself to, his secret fears and longings

This is an intriguing play and as presented by the two seasoned actors should delight Holmes specialists who have adored him since adolescence as well as those to whom in the past he has been only ‘a man in deer-stalker cap” (wisely omitted from this Holmes who is his own man, resorting to costumes only when on a case that demands them).

I predict a run on Doyle at the Lenox Library and The Book Store.

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