Readings from Conan Doyle
Amazing Holmes Company
The Polo Club, Union Hotel.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The Amazing Holmes Company has been amazing audiences for ten years. Founded by Kelvin Harman and John Kelly they have taken their readings of Conan Doyle to audiences all around South Australia as well as holding sessions at various venues in town. For the past six performances they have settled into rooms that the company find as agreeable as Baker Street itself – the Polo Club at the Union Hotel in Waymouth Street. For an event where ambience is nearly everything, the cosy wood fittings, friendly lighting, white tablecloths and Mrs Hudson beef and yorkshire pud menu all create a sense of hearth and Holmes.

Each show consists of a set menu- three course meal and two readings. After a welcoming sherry and time to get settled before a hearty plate of leek and potato soup the lights dim for The Second Stain, a tale of intrigue and Holmesian panache. The stage area is discreetly dressed with a velvet backdrop, a pot stand with aspidistra and four Victorian chairs each with a hard cover volume resting on it. The readers take their places. Kelvin Harman, adapter, director and general driving force behind the enterprise, is dressed in dinner jacket and butterfly collar. He is the narrator, Doctor Watson. Next to him in a scarlet quilted smoking jacket Matthew Randall plays a saturnine Holmes. Presenting a variety of not-very-quick constables, inspectors, Russian impersonators, fat invalids, perplexed prime ministers and concerned wives are John Kelly, Richard Margetson and Emma Salter.

Apart from the fact that, for all his patriarchal imperialism, Conan Doyle knew how to write a ripping yarn, the success of Amazing Holmes is that the actors know how to play the ragtime slowly. Precisely because this is the sort of idea that gets turned into theatre restaurant kitsch it is refreshing to have the readings presented with wit and flair. No-one shouts, no-one overacts- in fact apart from some nicely placed sidelong glances there is very little obvious performance at all. Kelly and Margetson clearly enjoy doing the hundred and one voices of Glasgow and Vladivostok but no-one is camping it. Even better, no-one is trying to do one better than Holmes or Conan Doyle.

The appeal of Sherlock Holmes is not a mystery. The short stories at their best are compressed dramas ideally suited to readings like this. Conan Doyle’s set-ups are vivid and engaging and Holmes’s solutions, seven per cent or not- are exhilirating in their omnipotence and amusing in their pedantry. The Second Stain with its breathless concern for the safety of the-very- Realm- itself, highlights Holmes the Edwardian Superman averting war for the PM but ever gallant about the compromised predicament of Lady Hilda Trelawney Hope.

After the main course and a cleansing red, the readers return- this time without Emma Salter- for part two: The Resident Patient, a tale of strange goings-on at the rooms of one Dr Trevelyan. Thirty five minutes, three sets of footprints, a few ooh-ahs from Watson and some mega-byte deductions from Holmes and we can soon rest assured, contentedly spooning into the apple crumble and brandy snaps.

With nearly two hundred Sherlock Holmes societies in the US, Amazing Holmes have their sights on a tour there in a year or so. Miami alone has four societies, California twenty seven – Kelvin Harman is right in thinking that his stylish ensemble is bound to fit the bill. Respectful of the texts but not unaware of their anachronism, Amazing Holmes could negotiate any room full of pipes and deerstalkers. In the meantime they have further sessions at the Polo Club in mid-August and mid-September for those who detect there’s fun to be had.

The Adelaide Review, August, 1993.