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View ProfilesPublished August 15, 2023 at 4:00 p.m. | Updated August 16, 2023 at 10:10 a.m.
Playwright Kate Hamill's comedy Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson — Apt. 2B includes the chummy tagline "Cheerfully desecrating the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle." The intent is clearly to bring cheer, and the production at Dorset Theatre Festival saws hard at the humor. The verbal wit is excellent. But the show uses excess to make up for a lack of structure and is ultimately more slapdash than comic.
Hamill is well known for her popular riffs on Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Her core technique in those plays is adding ultra-theatrical stunts to staid period pieces. In Holmes & Watson, she's made the characters female and transported them in time from foggy Victorian London, 1890s, to somber COVID-19-vaccinated London, 2021. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, a gentlemanly decorum prevails, but the detective often uses physical stunts and disguises to trick his suspects. Hamill spies an opportunity for stage hijinks.
The play gives director Aneesha Kudtarkar multiple comic avenues to pursue, from snappy dialogue that works quite well, to physical comedy that sometimes delights but often overwhelms the story with sheer surfeit, to stage magic that Dorset hasn't made magical enough.
Still, the volume of funny stuff is its own gag — triple casting, a gender flip, silly scene changes, accents, poses, lots of motion, oddball set dressings, witty lines, running jokes, sly references to venerated mysteries. Linking it together is irreverence toward an oft-spoofed detective deity, but the direction relies on too much huffing and puffing in search of the next laugh. Stuck bouncing off the hoariest Holmes clichés, the play never becomes a comedy with a force of its own.
Moriarty (Michael Frederic) opens the show, warning the audience that our interest in mysteries reflects a hope for tidy conclusions in which everything happens for a reason. What if our complacent yearning for answers must yield to a chaotic worldview? Great premise, but instead of a modernist vision of truth's relativity, what we get is hazy playwriting.
Dr. Joan Watson (Nessa Norich) herself is the first mystery. She's come from America looking for a cheap London apartment, and Mrs. Hudson (Francesca Fernandez, in the first of multiple roles) has a second bedroom to let. Hudson warns Watson that the tenant sharing the parlor, Sherlock Holmes, is eccentric, which here takes the form of listening to Russian symphonies at high volume and brandishing a fencing foil.
Watson wants nothing to do with her, but Holmes (Sara Haider) becomes invasively curious: Why is Watson here, and what's giving her panic attacks? That question lingers through the play, and the answer, though quite well performed by Norich, simply doesn't belong inside this broad, scattershot comedy.
The misfit roommates banter, yielding a good number of laughs but no particular connection. Enter eager Inspector Lestrade (Frederic again), straight from Scotland Yard, asking the famous Holmes for help on a case. Holmes tugs Watson along, and the three survey a murder scene where the grisly is merrily goofy.
Holmes is an overwound clock, rattling off what's beneath her magnifying glass too fast for us to hear and spouting random observations garnished with self-satisfaction. She solves the mystery by eliciting a confession that erupts like an inflatable life raft. Anything to keep the story moving. Some of the moves are great fun, such as Holmes and Watson whipping into disguise and just as quickly charging into slapstick. The production keeps surprising, but too many of the surprises are silly outbursts that lead nowhere.
Conan Doyle's Holmes used cocaine and morphine; Hamill's likes a cannabis buzz. The original detective had the intellectual courage to entertain the improbable; this modern version doesn't find anything unlikely. The differences between the canonical Holmes and Hamill's version are amusing to notice, but the update doesn't fully cohere into a character.
The gender switch trumpeted in the title doesn't lead to anything, either. A contemporary female Holmes might see the world differently from her Victorian male counterpart, and the Holmes-Watson pairing could explore either female friendship or same-sex attraction. But Hamill's feminist take gets no further than a modern appreciation for sex workers and a casual acceptance of revenge porn without a moral stance on it.
The performances sustain the show's overheated engine. Frederic and Fernandez careen through multiple characters. Frederic's Lestrade is great fun to underestimate, and his Moriarty lives under a raised eyebrow and perfect sneer.
Fernandez excels as Irene Adler, the one woman Conan Doyle created who bested Holmes and here gets quite the upper hand. A deliciously hot and wonderfully comic sexual magnetism arises between Irene and Sherlock, built from Fernandez's killer take-me-now stares and Haider's helpless return gazes.
Haider is best when at rest and thinking, but Kudtarkar and Hamill unfortunately never give Holmes much time off from babbling and scampering. Her motion is usually action for action's sake, and the result is more mannerism than character.
With quiet wit, Norich handles the job of foil to the restless Holmes. Watson alone gets to step outside the play, always to humorous effect. She's the one tipping over the three-card monte table of Holmes' idiosyncrasies.
Scenic designer Sarah Karl makes Sherlock's flat a room of patched plaster walls with a cool curio cabinet and a frat house's mess of food wrappers. Holmes' iconoclasm seems to extend to never billing her affluent clients. The space transforms for different scenes, sometimes enjoyably, but Dorset's usual tech tours de force are missing.
It was the clever dialogue that had the audience at last Friday's preview laughing hardest. The play never goes further than its mission statement: "Let's make fun of Sherlock Holmes." In this case, the fun is often easy exaggeration zipping by, giving us little time to do our own deducing. As soon as we do, we realize the play isn't an insightful homage but a catalog of stage bits. The verbal humor hits; the stage blood misses.
The original print version of this article was headlined "Murder, She Wrote | Theater review: Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson – Apt. 2B, Dorset Theatre Festival"
Tags: Theater, Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson — Apt. 2B, Kate Hamill, Dorset Theatre Festival, Sherlock Holmes
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