This comedy adventure enlists Sherlock Holmes to expose the true identity of Jack the Ripper. As if that splicing were not enough, writers Toby Hulse and Ross Smith also seek to expose the cliches around both figures, throw in a spoof of true-crime dramas and examine the fault-lines between truth and fiction.
It is a lot to take on in two hours. The result is amusing and convoluted, with perhaps too much delighting in the emphatic use of theatrical devices and the breaking of the fourth wall.
Under the direction of Adam Meggido, a chin-stroking prelude features commentators, in Victorian dress, speaking of how the 19th-century tabloid press sensationalised the crimes of Jack the Ripper to such a degree that they turned the mysterious serial killer into a monstrous fiction. “It takes a fiction to catch a fiction,” they argue, and so Holmes and Watson are sent in.
The cast of four switch roles, so Joseph Chance, Helen Foster, Philip Pellew and Chloe Tannenbaum all get a shot at playing Holmes, Watson, Mrs Hudson and the other characters. They are suitably fleet and Holmes is alternately played as a depressive in the mould of a Victorian Hamlet and the classic, gentleman detective in a deerstalker.
The story is emphatically paused so that Ripperologists, a museum curator, walking tour guides, a criminologist and PhD students can give their hot take on the killings in the mould of a true crime documentary.
But any aspiration for serious underlying reflections on the Ripper industry and the way in which criminality is narrativised for entertainment is lost amid the unruly mix, and at times the show seems paradoxically to become part of the entertainment it attempts to critique. While the crime is solved by Holmes, the answer to the mystery is not a particularly original one to those familiar with the various theories around the Ripper’s identity.
At Barn theatre, Cirencester, until 9 March
