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by R. Hamilton Wright & David Pichette, directed by Craig Hall

Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

August 11-October 27, 2018

“There stood a foul thing, a great, black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye has rested upon”

Given the style of its presentation the Shaw Festival’s production of The Hound of the Baskervilles amounts to a kiddie show for adults.  Director Craig Hall uses exactly the same set-up of screens and projections that Tim Carroll is using this season for the family show The Magician’s Nephew.  Americans R. Hamilton Wright and David Pichette, who adapted the Sherlock Holmes story for the Seattle Repertory Theatre in 2013, have given Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel a significant twist.  The result of this twist, however, is that the show runs almost three hours long and the story, by straying too far from the original, no longer makes sense.

First published in 1902, Conan Doyle’s novel tells of how the anxious Doctor James Mortimer (Graeme Somerville) travels from Devon to London to ask Holmes’s help in protecting the new heir of Baskerville Hall.  Mortimer, a friend of the previous owner Sir Charles Baskerville, is worried because in his view Sir Charles was killed by a gigantic hound that the locals regard as a supernatural being.  Now Sir Charles’s only living heir, Sir Henry (Kristopher Bowman) has arrived from Canada to take possession of Baskerville Hall and Dr. Mortimer wonders what can be done to protect him.

Holmes (Damien Atkins), who does not believe in the supernatural, suggests that Dr, Watson (Ric Reid) accompany Dr. Mortimer and Sir Henry to Baskerville Hall and send him daily reports on what he discovers.  Watson notices strange doings on the moors around the hall. A murderer has escaped the local prison and is thought to be lurking nearby.  The family butler Barrymore (Patrick Galligan) and his wife the cook (Claire Jullien) seem respectable enough, but Watson finds Barrymore signalling to someone from the Hall at night.  Watson and Sir Henry meet their neighbours the Stapletons, a brother Jack (Gray Powell) and his sister Beryl (Natasha Mumba).  Thinking Watson is Sir Henry, Beryl urges him to return to London immediately.  After realizing her mistake, she and the real Sir Henry fall in love much to Jack’s displeasure.  Watson also meets a Mr. Frankland (Cameron Grant) of a neighbouring estate whose family has had an age-old land dispute with the Baskervilles.

Wright and Pichette are very good at mixing humour with mystery, so much so that it is often John Gzowski’s portentous music and eerie soundscape that have to remind us that we are supposed to be anxious and frightened.  Though Wright and Pichette have eliminated one female character, they have boosted the roles of the three remaining female characters.  They have made Holmes’s housekeeper Mrs. Hudson more talkative and have turned Mrs. Barrymore into a key figure.  To Beryl Stapleton they have granted supposed psychic powers so that she occasionally falls into a swoon and imagines herself the first victim of the infernal hound back in the 17th century. 

Unhappily, Wright and Pichette have drastically altered the ending which I will not reveal.  Suffice it to say that anyone familiar with the original story will be surprised and not likely in a pleasant way.  Anyone unfamiliar with the original will likely find the new ending quite exciting and dramatic.  Yet, upon reflection after the show they will find that the new ending is unsatisfying and overly elaborate and does not accord with earlier events of the story.                               

This is not only an insult to the actors but is wholly unnecessary.  Do we need to see a passenger train chug across the screens to know that Watson is travelling from London to Devon (in a train strangely pulled by an American engine, not a British one)?  Worse, should we even see an image on the screens of the Hound of the Baskervilles as Dr. Mortimer describes it to Holmes?  Isn’t is far more frightening to allow us to imagine the beast than ever to see it, especially so near the start of the story when its very existence is still in doubt?  Indeed, not trusting that the audience has an imagination is the main sin that using such moving projections commits.  The multi-award-winning play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, currently running in London and New York is filled with magical effects yet director John Tiffany rarely uses projections and never attracts attention away from the actors with moving projections.

The cast for Hound is uneven but at least the principal roles are brilliantly played.  Chief of these is Damien Atkins as Holmes.  Obsessive, cerebral, mercurial, speaking in quick clipped diction, Atkins’s Holmes is most akin to the BBC’s nouveau Sherlock of Benedict Cumberbatch and carries this off with aplomb.  Atkins’s distinctive height and lankiness mean that we see through the various disguises Holmes adopts, but it is still fun to see what a wide range of voices and gestural languages Atkins has mastered. 

Ric Reid’s Dr. Watson is more like the Edward Hardwicke’s Watson in the Granada television series of the 1980s, a rock of sensibility and calm that helps anchor his brilliant but capricious friend.  Though frequently the butt of Holmes’s jokes, Reid’s Watson shows a steadfastness and dedication to Holmes and his work that both he and Holmes know is vital. 

Graeme Somerville is excellent as the earnest but anxious Dr. Mortimer, who suspects that more lies behind the happenings on the moors around Baskerville Hall than he can fathom.  Kristopher Bowman rather oddly plays Sir Henry Baskerville so much like a Texan in speech and gesture that it comes as a surprise to learn that the character is meant to Canadian in the play as in the novel. 

Had the Shaw Festival not done away with nearly its entire tier of beloved actors over 55, it would have had any number of candidates to play the elderly servants needed in the script.  As it is, still young lead actors are forced into those duties.  Claire Jullien plays both Holmes’s necessary but neglected housekeeper Mrs. Hudson and the oddly fearful cook Mrs. Barrymore at Baskerville Hall. Jullien clearly distinguishes the two characters, giving the first a jolliness that acts as its own rebuke against Holmes’s unintentional rudeness and giving the second a careworn attitude that immediately hints at a hidden secret. 

Patrick Galligan’s main role is the aged butler Mr. Barrymore which requires grey whiskers to make the youthful Galligan appear to be the ancient servant he is meant to be.  Galligan augments this with a change of voice and slowness of gait.  In addition to this, Galligan plays a number of other roles including the lively, but snarky stationmaster at Grimpen who could not be more of contrast with Barrymore.

Gray Powell is in his element as the ambiguous Jack Stapleton, who simultaneously appears harmless but capable of harm.  Powell lends his voice a slight drawl that can be interpreted either as thoughtful deliberateness or as malicious suspicion.  As Stapleton’s sister Beryl, Natasha Mumba easily brings off the role of a delicate, haunted young woman who paradoxically never appears as weak as the others think.  As the elderly Mr. Frankland, Cameron Grant, one of the youngest actors on stage, is placed in the difficult position of having to play one of the oldest characters.  Spraying his hair grey is not enough and Grant neither seems old in speech or movement.  False grey whiskers and false greyed hair are things one might expect at a high school production, not at a professional theatre.  With Mr. Frankland one again misses the many older actors no longer at the Shaw who could have given this role the weight it needs.

Those familiar with the original novel will be pleased with the perceptive characterizations of Damien Atkins and Ric Reid even if they have doubts about how Wright and Pichette have changed the ending.  Longtime Shaw Festival patrons will wonder why this year the most intellectually and emotionally demanding of the three shows at the Festival Theatre should be the musical Grand Hotel, since The Magician’s Nephew and The Hound of the Baskervilles are basically adventure tales.  Can classic plays really not fill the Festival Theatre any longer?  We will have to wait and see.     

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Ric Reid as Dr. Watson and Damien Atkins as Sherlock Holmes; Damien Atkins as Sherlock Holmes; Ric Reid as Dr. Watson and Damien Atkins as Sherlock Holmes. ©2018 Emily Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.