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Manchester Evening News
Manchester Evening News
Entertainment
John Shammas

A body falling from the ceiling - and TWO dance numbers... The Hound of the Baskervilles at The Lowry, reviewed

Over the Christmas period, like so many others, I was unexpectedly confined to my own four walls upon being confronted with a positive lateral flow test.

After a sketchy day or two, the symptoms eased and to pass the remaining time in isolation my wife and I worked our way through a large cheese board and some overpriced crackers/chutney that was initially purchased for now-cancelled social gatherings at our house.

So instead of seeing friends in person, we formed a Covid-19 bubble with Benedict Cumberbtach and Martin Freeman and bulldozed our way through every episode of the BBC's Sherlock on iPlayer in some sort of wensleydale-induced fever dream.

About 18 hours later - 4 seasons, plus one Christmas special - we had completed the reimagining of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character, modernised for the Beeb by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, which became a global phenomenon and turned a dusty, brilliant detective into a surprise sex symbol.

As a way to spend the most depressing Christmas ever, you could do a lot worse.

During its original broadcast, Sherlock was genuinely must-watch, event television - like an England World Cup semi-final or those early-pandemic 5pm coronavirus briefings, but less depressing. Everyone watched it, and everyone loved it.

The reinvention of the classic detective showed the naysayers who believe broadcast television is finished and that prestige drama now only belongs to the streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon that as far as the format and the character is concerned, there's life in the old girl yet.

And so, a little over one month on, when a stage adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles popped up on The Lowry's programme I thought: "Yeah, why the hell not?"

There's something I've always loved about the original text.

I'm amused by the idea of this deeply intense city-boy detective being thrown out of London into the great English countryside for a much more rural mystery than usual.

Rather than the usual dark Sherlock tale of a murder to be solved in a broody metropolis, it has almost got the feeling of a bloke just having a really bad holiday - so out of his comfort zone that it is simply a disaster waiting to happen. Sort of like when they go abroad in those higher-budget-than-usual Only Fools and Horses episodes.

But this production, now on at The Lowry, isn't a high-budget affair - though it is as farcical and hilarious as Del Boy's latter-day adventures.

Adapted for the stage by Steven Canny and John Nicholson, the three-strong cast play about a dozen characters in total over the space of two genuinely raucous hours.

Included in the list of characters are, of course, Sherlock Holmes, Dr Watson, a couple of local Dartmoor yokels, a cockney cabbie, a priest and a besotted flamenco dancer.

From the off, it's clear this isn't what you may expect of a traditional Holmes tale.

Cast aside your idea of what the story should be, and you're in for a bonkers, completely essential reimagining.

It's packed with meta jokes, telling the classic tale of a doomed family and their haunted estate in a buffoonish manner - winking at the audience relentlessly with each passing minute and revelling in its own farcical nature.

What's most charming is that this is a play determined to take the absolute p*** out of itself.

The quality of the props are mocked, there's possibly more than 50 outfit changes, the cast's dodgy accents are lampooned, a body falls from the ceiling at one point and, memorably, it includes not one but TWO dance numbers.

It's been a while since I read Arthur Conan Doyle's original tale but I don't recall that.

The writing is superb. It's crash-bang-wallop with the gags, sort of how I'd imagine an Edgar Wright play to be - and while it's smart, the whole affair isn't to be taken seriously.

Whatever Serena Manteghi, Jake Ferretti and Niall Ransome are earning to put on this show, it isn't enough.

After the interval, a high-speed 10-minute sequence that I won't explain any further for the purpose of avoiding spoilers is so breathless and so remarkably performed it's hard to recall being in a crowd, pre or post-pandemic, where an audience were just that utterly in the palms of the performers.

The result of all this frantic energy is some kind of high-brow, meta panto - and a bloody good night out.

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