So much of working on this play, Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure involves allowing the audience to follow the patterns that weave together in the mosaic of the great detective's mind, so that he can display his brilliant deductions. There's great communal joy in listening to Holmes spell out a series of "observations" that then lead to his conclusion. We sense he's going to smack us in the face with his obvious conclusion, but we follow each strand of the fabric to its eventual conclusion, as if we can't look ahead to see it twists and turns.
As we've been unfolding these wonderfully theatrical moments on stage, our job has been both to lay out these "unfoldings" clearly, but also to ground them in the reality that keep them from being mere flights of fantasy.
John Alcott, who is playing Holmes, is doing a brilliant job of letting us into the mind that seems to never stop processing. At this point he's starting to add some real flesh on to the bones of Holmes that I think will both surprise and delight the aficionados. We've got a week to go, and we're poised to really sink out teeth in a bit deeper in the next six days before the first performance.
This is turning into too much fun to call it work.
