Devil Dogs Hit the Stage

What can be more frightening than the thought of a ghostlyhound roaming the moor and seeking vengeance for the sins of a dastardlybaronet who chased a young woman to her death? Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville stagedat Liverpool playhouse who has a habit of scaring the audience silly at Christmas.Most notably with Melly Still’s flawed but fascinating staging of Shirley Jackson’spsychological shocker the haunting of hill house. But the only danger with LovedayIngram’s production of Baskerville is that you might die laughing. Or at leastthe case might: on the night, I saw it, there was more corpsing than corpses,which rather upped the enjoyment levels. Part of the appeal of the great but rather egotisticaland pompous Sherlock Holmes is that we can admire him and laugh at him at thesame time.

The Liverpool production almost certainly gets the betterbalance between shivers and thrills, but then they have the bigger smokemachine and have called on the skills of Simon Daw for the set, costume andvideo design – which gives us a glimpse of Sir Hugo’s dreadful deed in animatedform. But not to be outdone, Wakeham brings verve to the Jermyn Street productionby cleverly staging Watson and Henry’s journey from London to Paddington as asilent movie. It’s one of the highlights of the show, as is the post-intervalquick-fire reprise of all that come before, to ensure the audients ce stay ontop of a knotty plot.

Neither of these shows is a substitute for reading the novel,but both come from a place of love and admiration for the original which is probablybe the Doyle’s most satisfying Holmes mystery despite of serious discussion on the‘real murders’ by readers and critics all the time.

Baskerville was by far the most complete of the four SherlockHomes novels. It is a pastiche of both gothic and detective conventions, both playfullyreferential and still powerfully unnerving. It furnished readers with manyiconic Holmesian moments but also integrated the character into a long,coherent story form which he is marginalized for much of its duration.