Manic character-switching creates a howling triumph
The Hound of the Baskervilles
★★★★★
IBy Dominic Cavendish n The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), Arthur Conan Doyle created an infernal vision that has gripped the popular imagination ever since: a bloodthirsty moorland beast, given to chilling howls.
In a new version of Doyle’s much dramatised novel at the Watermill, Newbury, director Abigail Pickard Price and her team have – by contrast – rustled up a frolicsome spectacle of heavenly delight, one which in its own devil-may care, irreverent way is helping raise theatre from the dead.
With the prospect of fully realised (and attended) indoor performances put on the back-burner for months more (at the risk, it seems, of snuffing out the sector), those venues with bucolic outdoor spaces are in the best position to claw their way out of the current nightmare scenario.
In a normal summer, the invitation to watch a show in the gardens of the Watermill – a hedge high and long, arboreal shelter, a stream within earshot and lots of waddling waterfowl – would be irresistible. In 2020, it feels still more so, as curative as a Covid vaccine. Still, there’s something surreal and even a little unsettling about the set-up – all health and safety signage and antibacterial spray – that has allowed the theatre to reopen after months of closure.
In all, there are 20 tables, each seating a maximum party of four and set apart an orderly two metres, with food and drink brought to you. And the three-strong, period-dressed troupe are adhering to distancing markers on the makeshift stage as well.
It’s almost – yet not really – how things used to be, but this ambient peculiarity is used to augment the barking pleasure of the proceedings. There’s an opening satirical nod to the bamboozling edicts of the Johnson government – the artistic guidance is read out in a Borissy way (“Learn the play, but don’t feel like you need to have actually learnt the play”). Then
– with the trio (Victoria Blunt, Rosalind Lailey and James Mack) synchro-squirting their hands with sanitiser gel – we’re into a 90-minute welter (plus interval) of manic character-switching and costumechanging, with arch narration, histrionic gasps and chorused hound-wails. Each player strains to keep suitably apart from the others. Bits of paper get pretend-passed via sleight of hand, a plastic screen is found for a tête à tête, face-masks are donned for roving the grounds
It’s ersatz amateurish but not remotely bumbling. Blunt and Lailey form a comically faultless genderflipped double-act as Watson and Holmes, with Mack bringing hearty machismo to the fray and memorably-bathetically succumbing to a sackcloth “hound”. Somehow, a vestigial sense of the original’s compulsive dread and darkness lingers, but the object of the exercise is an escapist lightness of touch.
We may not stand a cat in hell’s chance of getting out of the pandemic crisis any time soon, but this stirring return of an old fictional friend, a much loved venue and the semblance of theatre-as-was at least puts us on the right trail.
Until Aug 8. Tickets (returns only): 01635 46044; watermill.org.uk
Blunt and Lailey form a comically faultless genderflipped double-act