The Hound of the Baskervilles, Watermill, review: socially-distanced al fresco Sherlock? Elementary!
In The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), Arthur Conan Doyle resurrected Sherlock Holmes – having ventured to kill him off, to general dismay, some eight years earlier. In so doing, he created an infernal vision that has gripped the popular imagination ever since: a blood-thirsty moorland beast of dreadful aspect, given to chilling howls.
In a new version of Doyle’s much dramatised novel at the Watermill, Newbury, director Abigail Pickard Price and her team have – by contrast – rustled up a frolicsome spectacle of heavenly delight, one which in its own devil-may care, irreverent way is helping raise theatre from the dead. With the prospect of fully realised (and attended) indoor performances put on the back-burner for months more (at the risk, it seems, of snuffing out the sector), those venues with bucolic outdoor spaces are in the best position to claw their way out of the current nightmare scenario.
In a normal summer, the invitation to watch a show in the gardens of the Watermill – a hedge high and long, arboreal shelter, a stream within earshot and lots of waddling waterfowl – would be irresistible. In 2020, it feels still more so, as curative as a Covid vaccine.
Still, there’s something surreal and even a little unsettling about the set-up that has allowed the theatre to reopen after months of closure: health and safety signage abounds as much as the flora, and while trails of dinky outdoor lights delight the eye, the sight of anti-bacterial spray doesn’t wholly escape it either. In all, there are 20 tables, each seating a maximum party of four and set apart an orderly two metres, with food and drink brought to you. And the three-strong, period-dressed troupe are adhering to distancing markers on the makeshift stage as well.
It’s almost – yet not really – how things used to be, but this ambient peculiarity is used to augment the barking pleasure of the proceedings. Deriving theatrical mirth from a page-turning thriller and accentuating the daftness of attempting it on a shoestring isn’t new – indeed in 2007, anarchic theatre troupe Peepolykus’s spoof Baskervilles made it into the West End. Here, the need for a socially distanced Sherlock adds to the problem-solving fun, and reminds us of the innate glory of the art-form: whatever constraints you throw at it, creative ingenuity will prevail; the tighter the leash, the faster our imagination runs.
There’s an opening satirical nod to the bamboozling edicts of the Johnson government – the artistic guidance is read out in a Borissy way (“Learn the play but don’t feel like you need to have actually learnt the play”). Then – with the trio (Victoria Blunt, Rosalind Lailey and James Mack) synchro-squirting their hands with sanitiser gel – we’re into a 90-minute welter (plus interval) of manic character-switching and costume-changing, with arch narration, histrionic gasps and chorused hound-wails.
Laughably worlds removed from (say) Cumberbatch or Rathbone, each player strains to keep suitably apart from the others. Bits of paper get pretend-passed via sleight of hand, a plastic screen is found for a tête à tête, face-masks are donned for roving the grounds.
It’s ersatz amateurish but not remotely bumbling. Blunt and Lailey form a comically faultless gender-flipped double-act as Watson and Holmes, with Mack bringing hearty machismo to the fray and memorably-bathetically succumbing to a sack-cloth “hound”. Somehow, a vestigial sense of the original’s compulsive dread and darkness lingers, but the object of the exercise is an escapist lightness of touch. We may not stand a cat in hell’s chance of getting out of the pandemic crisis any time soon, but this stirring return of an old fictional friend, a much loved venue and the semblance of theatre-as-was at least puts us on the right trail.
Until Aug 8. Tickets (returns only): 01635 46044; watermill.org.uk
