Victorian summer home
Chris Gibbs is back at Victoria Playhouse for his third season, this time to perform his oneman show “Not Quite Sherlock, The Case of the Deceptive Detective.”
Chris Gibbs is a well-established comedian who feels at home on some of the country’s biggest stages and screens. He has performed at “Just For Laughs” in Montreal, appeared in two CBC Winnipeg Comedy Festival galas and starred in the indie Canadian feature film, “Run Robot Run.” But, for the past three summers, he’s been feeling at home in Victoria.
The first year he performed with Canadian actor Cathy Jones. The second, he brought his prize-winning one-man show, “Like Father, Like Son? Sorry” to Victoria Playhouse.
“It’s lovely here. And one of the nicest things about coming back is that things are familiar,” says Gibbs, with a smile. For example he’s gotten
to know Ron Quenesel, the theatre’s set carpenter/crew member.
“There are little things like I’ve spent every evening (backstage) with him, when I’m at my most nervous and he’s being his usual, calm self. It’s not that I’m flying out to see him but it’s lovely to see him again.”
Gibbs has also gotten acquainted with Eugene Sauve, owner of the Landmark Café, and the servers at the Boathouse Take-Out, where he goes for fish and chips once a week. Now that he’s a regular summer visitor, “people are paying attention,” says Gibbs, who is performing his one-man show “Not Quite Sherlock, The Case of the Deceptive Detective” on stage at Victoria Playhouse until Sept. 17.
The setting is London 1896. Barnaby Gibbs is an incurable optimist, a Sherlock Holmes fan and a man who knows he’s not particularly good at anything.
One night while checking on a friend’s empty house, he encounters a stranger dressed entirely in black, holding a bag full of stolen belongings and attempting to write a poem about sapphires.
There is only one conclusion a reasonable man could come to: this is the notorious cat burglar/con-man known as the Rhyming Bandit. Fortunately, Gibbs is not a reasonable man, and when the stranger explains he is actually the famous detective, Antoine Feval, a new crime-fighting duo is born. “Not Quite Sherlock, The Case of the Deceptive Detective” is a one-man comedy play about Victorian London’s most overlooked detective. It’s also a comedy about an ex-street-performer attempting to do a one-man comedy play about Victorian London’s most overlooked detective.
At first, one-man shows made him feel nervous. So Gibbs asked his friend, director Mark Chavez, for advice. “He said, ‘Don’t worry about it. If you look one way for one guy and you change your voice and look the other way for the other guy, audiences are clever enough they’ll go with you. “He also told me to keep my jokes in (the show for comic relief).”