The Hound of the Baskervilles review – boutique Sherlock gets laughs but fails to solve the real mystery

To get the measure of how tiresome this Sherlock Holmes adaptation is, you just have to think of its antecedents. The joke is that there are only four actors to represent the famous detective, his sidekick John Watson, various members of the Baskerville family, plus servants, neighbours and yokels, not to mention number 221B Baker Street, windswept moorland a country pile. The impossibility of achieving such a task comes at the expense of theatre itself: the shaky props, the hasty costume changes and the over-stretched stage manager.

Hasty costume changes … Alex Phelps in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Photograph: Andrew Billington

Laughing at the medium is an old idea. But when, say, Victoria Wood did it in Acorn Antiques, she had a reason. Yes, daytime TV soaps were an easy target for satire, but a target nonetheless. And when the National Theatre of Brent attempted two-man epics such as Wagner’s Ring Cycle or The Messiah, the crazy ambition was funny in itself.

The bar is not especially high, but in comparison, this Conan Doyle rehash, first staged by Peepolykus in 2007 , is vacuous. Written by Steven Canny and John Nicholson, and now revived by director Joyce Branagh, it is a show without purpose.

As it happens, it is faithful to the outline of the original. Strip away the gurning, the mugging and the accents, and you have a fair account of the tale, set on an isolated Dartmoor where a reputedly ravenous beast and an escaped convict are at large. Holmes and Watson piece together the clues just as Conan Doyle intended.

Yet you get no sense that actors Alyce Liburd, Jerone Marsh-Reid, Alex Phelps and Tom Richardson have any reason to tell this story, still less any impression of its mystery, jeopardy and revelation. Their only aim is to milk the material for laughs.

They do this with vigour and charm, but this is theatre for theatre’s sake. As a 10-minute sketch it would be tolerable; as a two-and-a-half hour night out, the lack of necessity is wearisome.

That there is a market for this stuff is beyond doubt. The audience lap it up as if watching the material being invented afresh. It would take a Sherlock-grade sleuth to figure out why.