The Hound of the Baskervilles
Arthur Conan Doyle, adapted by Oliver Gray
Illyria
Actors’ Church. Covent Garden
Star rating: 3.5
Now close to the end of its tour, this Illyria show is adeptly bedded in and it’s a showcase for the accomplishments of of four talented – and versatile – actors and their imaginative director, Oliver Gray. It’s a wittily affectionate send-up of an old favourite.
However, because it is now mid September , the show was staged inside the Actors’ Church rather than in the garden and, although it was good not to get wet and cold, it made for problems. Illyria is an outdoor theatre company and these actors are so used to working against traffic, aircraft, scampering children and other background noise that they are over-projecting here. Their voices are pitched too loud for an indoor space and that means that quite a lot of the dialogue is lost in the echo-y acoustic of St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, especially in the higher registers. Margot Navellou (generally good) is, for example, almost incomprehensible as the very Canadian Sir Henry Baskerville.
This issue apart though, this is a very slick and funny take on one of the most famous detective/ghost stories in English. The plot takes Holmes (Julian Brett) and Watson (Stuart Tavendale) to Dartmoor at the behest of Dr Mortimer (Rob Keeves). Their job (which for a long time, Watson thinks he is doing alone as a quasi Holmes apprentice) is to investigate the death of Sir Charles Baskerville, who is supposed to have died of heart problems but, on the other hand, may have fallen victim to the ghost of the huge, savage canine which has haunted the moor for centuries.
It is a wonderful idea to cast a trans actor as Holmes because it somehow makes him forcefully sexless in all his single-minded, decisive pronouncements. Julian Brett finds all the right humorous gravitas and puts Holmes down repeatedly. A talented multi-roler like everyone in this cast, Brett also gives a delightful performance as the black bearded family retainer and has a superb knack of using silence, often looking at the audience and using eloquent eye-speak. It’s comic timing to perfection.
The other three actors slot in and out of other roles at top speed especially in Holmes’s final debriefing in which they keep appearing as different characters in his narrative and it’s both fast and funny.
When anyone in an Oliver Gray adaptation rides in a carriage – as they frequently do in pre 20th stories – he uses a pair of coconuts and rhythmic movement to evoke it. And it gets an admiring chuckle from the audience every single time. You don’t, evidently, always have to be original to be successful.
There’s some amusing puppetry in this show too, not least at the moment of climax with much barking, manic music from Ben Wiles’s sound track and a glimpse of a hound/ cur/dog/ canine which may or may not be a flesh-and-blood animal …?
Illyria is announcing its 2025 season later this week.
