I went to see "Sherlock Holmes: The Last Act" yesterday evening (25/3/23) and here is my review.
Sherlock Holmes: The Last Act
The White Bear Theatre, Kennington, London SE11
Sat, 25th March 2023
Dir: Gareth Armstrong
Play: David Stuart Davies
Actor: Nigel Miles-Thomas
An hour long one-hander with Holmes, now retired, reminiscing and reflecting on his life and cases to an imagined Dr Watson, whose funeral service he has just attended. It is written by the eminent Holmesian scholar, David Stuart Davies, author of numerous Sherlockian studies and pastiches.
It is the year 1916, the middle of the Great War, and the ageing and slightly declining Holmes is bewildered by the new century and the technology it has ushered in, of motor cars and aircraft and so much else. And he is repelled by its brutality, the carnage in the trenches all too horrifyingly present in his mind. A world he no longer understands. But it is no matter. He launches ebulliently into a cascade of anecdotes, surfing from one case to another, his enthusiasm carrying him like a tidal wave; until, every once in a while, his confident demeanour fades away and he falls into a reverie, suddenly conscious that those days are past. We begin to realise that he is a man beset with doubts and frailties, repining that he did not show Watson the affection he felt for him nor give him the respect he deserved. Intimations of fallibility slip through the cracks of his buoyant self-confidence.
There are wonderful, often quite lengthy, passages of narrative and dialogue from many of the famous stories in the canon, delivered in an effervescent register, bouncing from A Study in Scarlet: “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive”, he booms when he first meets his future amanuensis; to The Sign of Four, which sees Watson’s marriage (to Holmes’s dismay and displeasure), “I really cannot congratulate you, Watson.”; A Scandal in Bohemia” and hints of sexual arousal and repression in his encounter with Irene Adler; The Five Orange Pips and its marvellous depiction of the opening scene at Baker Street, “...and the wind cried and sobbed like a child in the chimney”; The Speckled Band; and his loathing of the savage wife-beating, Dr Grimesby Roylott; The Final Problem and his encounter with his arch nemesis, Prof Moriarty; The Hound of the Baskervilles, and the chilling denouement on the moors; His Last Bow and the exposure and capture of the German spy, von Bork. A magnificent tour d’horizon of Holmesiana.
But there is an undercurrent of regret and even self-recrimination informing his monologue. He yearns for the days of old, the days of adventure, when the game was still very much afoot and he and Watson would dash off in a hansom at a moment’s notice. Now he has no cases to solve and nothing to stimulate his intellect and he has fallen back on his bad ways of cocaine addiction to relieve the tedium. And we hear, towards the end, an extraordinary personal revelation, one that he had never vouchsafed to Watson, nor probably to anyone; one that dramatically altered the course of his life.
Miles-Thomas gives a mesmerising performance as the great detective playing, I believe, fourteen roles; everyone from Watson to Moriarty to Lestrade to Dr Mortimer, von Bork and to his own father, slipping in and out of the voices and characterisations as easily and seamlessly as he slips in and out of his smoking jacket.
The single set is sparse, the drawing room at 221b Baker Street, with just the familiar props; the magnifying glass, the meerschaum, the violin, a glass of brandy, a copy of one of Watson’s casebooks and the box containing the syringe, with which he administers his seven percent solution of cocaine, not once but twice. The only special effects are the sporadic dimming of the lights and the sounds of gunshots or voices or music to conjure the vision Holmes is describing.
A gripping and spell-binding hour which all devotees of the canon will relish.
26th March 2023
