Mary Leland reviews Sherlock Holmes - The Last Act! at the Everyman Palace in Cork

Sherlock Holmes - The Last Act! Everyman Palace, Cork

An actor completely in charge of his material, his stage and his own artistry, Roger Llewellyn invests his performance in Sherlock Holmes - The Last Act! with all the tension achieved by Conan Doyle at his best.

Written by David Stuart Davies and unfolding in the measured sequences of classic detective fiction, the play is, of course, a brilliant opportunity for any actor with the intelligence to grasp its rhythms and to peel away the sometimes pompous layers of the eponymous hero and reveal the passionate, lonely personality underneath.

Opportunity is one thing: grasping it is another, and the vocally impeccable Llewellyn responds with an ardour which is honed to trace each nuance and to explore each clue.

Presented by Jay Productions in association with the Salisbury Playhouse, the piece is, in fact, something of an exercise in detection in itself, but one of great style and subtlety. This is Holmes in 1916, mourning his colleague Watson whom he is at last able to acknowledge as a dear friend, and re-working through his tribute a series of plots and characters with which both have been memorably associated. It is a fiction upon a fiction, and held its audience captivated through two acts of 45 minutes each.

Both captivity and duration are important because there is only one man physically on stage, although several others are briefly introduced. Music by Simon Slater and lighting by Peter Hunter are threaded through Gareth Armstrong's direction in a presentation in which the few props are employed so skilfully that the bravura touches here and there are accents rather than declarations, commas rather than exclamation marks.

This is a production which has been touring in England, Europe and America, yet there is nothing stale about it. The playwright - a Conan Doyle enthusiast - seasons his script with implied acknowledgements of contemporary approaches, but both the writing and the performance achieve an almost old-fashioned - and certainly rare - symmetry of excellence and entertainment.

Until Sat

Mary Leland