Sherlock Holmes and the Valley of Fear at Southwark Playhouse review
Sherlock Holmes and the Valley of Fear | Southwark Playhouse | ★★★★☆
It is easy to forget how much talent London is home to. It is not hard to find extraordinary, professional acting in stripped-back productions playing one of London’s many, small, off-West End and pub theatres: a gift that few other capital cities can give.
Sherlock Holmes and the Valley of Fear at Southwark Playhouse Borough is one such production: relying on a cast of five, bric-à-brac set furnishing, and very little marketing, it delivers a hugely satisfying adaptation of one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s longest and most complex Holmes books.
Nick Lane’s adaptation and direction makes use of simple, precise stage movements and changing accents to tell two stories in parallel. The action moves continuously back and forth between a “most horrific murder” in a moated manor, set in leafy, suburban Victorian England, and the Pennsylvania coalfields of 1875, where the strife between exploited miners, organised in secret societies, and the coal and railway barons, trying to subdue them through private investigators and informers, plays out.
Moriarty makes an appearance in a South Kensington art gallery, thanks to poetic license, and the real events of the Irish Molly Maguires underpin the US half of the plot-line. There is elegant mirroring of detective work in both stories, but the clever split narrative of this production ensures that we only discover this at the end.
A half-built frame is the window bearing the footprint of an escaped murderer in one scene, swiftly doubling up as the rolled down window of a slow locomotive, winding along the US coal state, in the next. Empty market craters furnish the seating of this train compartment, only to reincarnate as the fast, if somewhat poor on suspensions, horse carriage taking Holmes and Watson on the scene of the crime back in England.
It is this kind of theatrical ingenuity, accompanying the already delightful, witty exchanges between Holmes and Watson, preserved intact with Doyle’s many stylistic flourishes, which delivers much of the pleasure. The rest is simply down to phenomenal acting. Bobby Bradley makes an excellent Holmes, and Joseph Derrington gives us a most likable Watson. Blake Kubena brings US acting flair to both his gang member and Lord of the Manor roles. Alice Osmanski is brilliant and completely believable in all five of her characters, deploying a range of acting skills seldom seen in a single play. Gavin Molloy masters the intricacies of an Irish American accent with outstanding results as the ferocious head of a Molly Macguires lodge.
This latest production by Blackeyed Theatre, a twenty-year old company that brilliantly self-describes as sustainable theatre, offers a truly delightful and wholesome evening of entertainment, suitable for teen and adult audiences alike, in an area of London normally associated with food and drink rather than the arts. Not that you’ll be short of choice on your way out of the Playhouse: Mercato Metropolitano – think pop-up stalls grow up and get organised – is a stone’s throw away so you can easily make a whole night out of the combined pleasures of street food and stage.
• Sherlock Holmes and the Valley of Fear runs until 13th April 2024 – book here