This was Sherlock Holmes and the Ripper Murders at Reading Hexagon, which sees Holmes and Watson taking on the nefarious Victorian killer, Jack the Ripper. It all sounded rather fun and the few reviews I had cast my eye over beforehand hadn't been entirely scathing. Unfortunately it later transpired that they were wrong, and that I too was wrong for having agreed so eagerly to go along.
Written by Brian Clemens - allegedly anyway; frankly I don't think it was written at all - it also stars his son, Samuel, as Holmes. Samuel Clemens, you may have noticed, was also the real name of Mark Twain, and indeed, they are related. While it would be unfair to expect the Current Clemens Clan to have inherited the literary genius of their forebear, you would hope some semblance of the gene might have survived the ages. Alas, it appears to have been interred with Twain, where last night it was no doubt viciously tossed about as he span. One can only hope for the family's sake that another thing he failed to pass down was his middle name, 'Langhorne.'
The main problem - and that's main, mark you, not only - was the fact that the story didn't flow. You could've shuffled the scenes about hither and yon and it wouldn't have made any more sense. In fact I'm not entirely convinced some stagehand didn't drop all the scripts on the floor before he gave them to the actors and then everyone just went with it. There were pictures of Mary Kelly's body popping up before Mary Kelly was even dead. And when she did die, it wasn't in the place that she really died and therefore the pictures that could've weakly been explained away as 'foreshadowing' were now just void. The set was passable, though one could frequently see the actors hidden behind the projection screen waiting for their cue. The last time I experienced that was at Blackpool Pleasure Beach watching a so-called 'magic show,' which was without a doubt the worst performance I have ever seen, but then I was at Blackpool so I managed to quell my horror until I had removed myself from the theatre and cheered myself up with a ride on the teacups. The music was really quite hideous and it just wouldn't stop, and the sound effects mistimed and unusual. Jack the Ripper kept whipping his knife out with a screech more suited to a two-handed battleaxe from the Mines of Moria bouncing off a goblin shield - and usually a couple of seconds too late. Once, on a request from Holmes to close the curtains, Watson only had to turn and give said curtains a stony glare before they had tugged themselves together in fright.
I felt a little bad for the actors, because there wasn't a whole lot they could've done to rescue the situation. But they could've at least tried. Holmes was bland and his voice impossible to decipher unless he was looking right at me, which he did do sometimes but I found it unnerving, like I was being singled out and he was probably in the process of making some Holmesian deduction that I was having an awful time. The ill-conceived and irrelevant love interest, Mrs Meade, was projecting far too loudly into her co-actors' faces and also seemed to have the uncanny ability to speak solely out of her nose. Only Watson had any real character, though he was blessed with all four of the decent lines, and his cockney twang did feel a little... out-of-place, for the occasion. However, special mention should go to the man who had the fit, because having a fit on stage looks like one of the most gut-wrenchingly humiliating things the human body could ever be forced to endure, and I only snorted with laughter once. So well done you, sir.
I know you can't please all of the people all of the time, but one should at least try not to alienate all of the people in the first ten minutes. The last play I went to see was a student performance called Bricking It at King's College London. It was better written, better directed, and better acted than Sherlock Holmes and it only cost a fiver. It was entirely put together by students with little experience, in their spare time, and I know for a fact that students do not have a lot of spare time because they must spend it all studying and recovering from crippling hangovers. It made the audience laugh for all the right reasons and I didn't look at my watch once. I would say that the company behind Sherlock could learn a thing or two from them, but really, I shouldn't have to. There's no excuse for such a poor show, and certainly not when it's charging twenty pounds for the privilege. I could've got half-way to rat-arsed in the nearest Wetherspoons for that amount of money.
And right now, I wish I did.
 |
| After reading this, the director called me a twat and made fun of my name. |
No comments:
Post a Comment