Ms Holmes and Ms Watson – Apt. 2B at Arcola Theatre – review

The biggest mystery about Ms Holmes and Ms Watson – Apt 2B is why the Arcola Theatre and Reading Rep Theatre would choose to stage it, of all the plays in the world. Playwright Kate Hamill has adapted several classic works of literature for the stage and is apparently one of the most frequently produced writers across the pond. One can only hope that the rest of her oeuvre is stronger than this deeply unfunny attempt at farce.

Joan Watson has given up her medical career and arrives at a seedy guesthouse on Baker Street (Max Dorey’s set design is credibly cluttered, with a rather nice pink Smeg fridge), where she’s thrown into the orbit of eccentric basement dweller Shirley “Sherlock” Holmes. The world-building is lazy and the storytelling is a mess. For all its claims to be a “boldly feminist” revision of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original tales, making the protagonists women is just window dressing, and there’s no social commentary, just pratfalls and shrillness.

It’s clearly adapted by someone who knows nothing about Britain (it should be “Flat 2B”, not “Apt”, for one thing). The bathtub murder of a cab driver results in uncovering a communist plot, suggesting that the Cold War is still going on in 2020s London. The inconsistencies are rife: Holmes has never heard of Google, yet she talks about microchips and the brain-rotting effects of apps.

Directed by Sean Turner (who had a hit with Why I Stuck a Flare Up My Arse for England and served as associate director of The Play That Goes Wrong), the material is stretched to 2 hours 40 minutes, with one case succeeding another with no momentum. Before the interval, there’s a sinking feeling when we’re introduced to Elliot Monk, a presidential hopeful with a sordid personal life (in case it wasn’t clear, he arrives in a Donald Trump mask). There’s then a new low when Holmes and Watson dress up as nuns with questionable Irish accents in order to steal a USB stick from famous sex worker Irene Adler’s flat and start to self-flagellate.

Lucy Farrett adopts a know-it-all voice and ghoulishly affected mannerisms as Holmes. Simona Brown manages to retain some dignity as Watson, but the attempt to bring some emotional gravitas to the proceedings with her second-act monologue about how she’s suffering from PTSD after having to attend to a conveyor belt of dying patients during the pandemic is too little too late.

As housekeeper Mrs Hudson, Alice Lucy has an accent that can’t decide whether it wants to be Scottish or Irish and, as Adler, is a painfully two-dimensional vamp. Tendai Humphrey Sitima is unconvincing as hopeless policeman Lestrade (dressed like a 1940s private eye) and the aforementioned Monk.

Ultimately, Hamill has nabbed Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters and tricks without doing anything clever or new. “You’re not cute, and I don’t want your banter,” says Watson. Elementary, for once.