Theatre
Holmesiana
Peter Jenkins
The Crucifer of Blood (Haymarket) Holmesians take their games seriously, engage in bogus scholarship and trade in relics. I have always found their affectations extremely tedious, especially when they resort to dressing up in deerstalkers, and the stories themselves too stylised to be taken seriously; their charm is as period pieces and as such they have survived the comings and goings of Victorian fashions. Victoriana is all the craze in New York, as well as in the London saleroom, and The Crucifer of Blood arrives at the Haymarket as a certified Broadway hit.
It is an original Sherlock Holmes mystery, which is to say that it is written by Paul Giovanni, an American actor-director, and is not based on a Conan Doyle story. There are two ways of putting Holmes on the stage, spoof or straight. Giovanni has chosen the straight way and tried to make his thriller thrilling, for which purpose Holmes and Watson need to be convincing characters. Keith Michell's Holmes is certainly original — elegant and dandified — while Denis Lill's Watson is far from the usual ass. The period setting is recreated in the most loving detail and if you are one of those who finds it fun to take Sherlock Holmes seriously you will thoroughly enjoy your evening.
The plot is immensely elaborate. The story begins in India at the time of the Mutiny. Two young officers, Major Ross and Captain St Claire, make off with the crown jewels while guarding the Red Fort at Agra. Their accomplice, Private Small, is cheated of his share but not until he has extracted an oath sworn in blood which is sanctioned by a terrible Indian curse. The two officers reminded me somewhat of Grippipe-Thyne and Neddy Seagoon in this plot-thickened first scene but the menace and mystery of India — 'that sink of humanity' as one of them calls it — was thoroughly authentic.
Holmes and Watson enter 30 years later when the curse, in the returning form of Small, now one-eyed and one-legged, is visited upon Ross and St Claire. Holmes is shooting up coke one morning at 221b Baker Street when St Claire's daughter (our upper-class Miss Hampshire) arrives with her unlikely tale. The trail leads to Pondicherry Lodge, Maidenhead, where Ross gets his comeuppance from a poisoneddart, and to an opium den in Limehouse where St Claire is finished off by an unusually lethal pipe.
The programme begs us not to reveal the final secret of the mystery but I am afraid that I guessed who dunnit from the first and saw through the denouement in a flash. Elementary, it was. Nor were Holmes's flights of deduction at all impressive I thought. The black undertones of the play, buggery and syphilis, seemed overcontrived attempts to give it a more adult bite. It was the spectacular staging which carried it through, a momentous thunderstorm and a scene in which vessels loom through a night fog on the Thames. That, and the starry acting of Susan Hampshire and Keith Michell, Denis Lill's steady Watson and John Cater as the numbskull from the Yard, gave a convincing polish to an evening of flimsy substance.
Previous page
