Sherlock Holmes Review: Strong Leads, Restless Script

Sherlock Holmes Review | Regent's Park Open Air Theatre

A show with real spark that keeps tripping over its own ambition.

You walk into Regent's Park and the sky is already doing the work. Wednesday had been rain on and off, and by press night the dry ice on stage was competing with the visible breath of the cast. It looked incredible and nobody planned it. That is the thing about this venue.

Grace Smart's revolving set is a broken proscenium arch with platforms at different heights. It keeps everything moving. Characters come out of the dark, disappear into the trees, run through the auditorium. Ryan Day's lighting takes its time and once the sky goes fully dark in the second half, it earns it. Amber and shadow in a way a roof would ruin.

Joshua James plays Holmes in sky blue silk, restless and drug-dependent from the first scene. He loses a bare knuckle fight at the top of the show and fires deductions across the room like he cannot stop himself. There is something of Rik Mayall in him, a lot of surface noise with real precision underneath.

Jyuddah Jaymes as Watson is the steadier presence and honestly the more interesting one to watch. He is not playing the sidekick. Watson here is a Black British man who got where he is through scholarships and carries his own moral position throughout. When the two of them are just talking, the show finds its rhythm. Those scenes are the best thing here.

The story borrows its shape from The Sign of Four then keeps building. Mughal gems, a prologue set during the 1857 Indian Mutiny, stolen government documents, a jail break, a boat chase on the Thames, a body coming off a moving train, a second act circus with fire eaters. It is a lot.

Patrick Warner's Mycroft carries the sharpest idea in the script, that the British Empire was a confidence trick rather than a military reality. A performance of control rather than genuine force. It is a genuinely interesting angle and the production keeps rushing past it.

The colonial thread surfaces and gets buried. The Watson narrator conceit, the suggestion that we are watching the real events he later cleaned up and published as the Holmes stories, comes and goes without committing. By the second act the pace stops feeling like energy and starts feeling like something is being avoided.

The woman behind me at the interval said she had no idea what was going on but was having a great time. Honestly the most accurate summary of the evening.

There is a version of this show, with a script that trusted itself enough to slow down, that would be very good. The leads are strong, the setting is extraordinary, the craft around them is solid. What it is missing is stillness. This one is still worth seeing once.

PRODUCTION INFO

Written by Joel Horwood

Directed by Sean Holmes

Cast: Joshua James (Sherlock Holmes), Jyuddah Jaymes (Dr Watson), Nadi Kemp-Sayfi (Mary), Patrick Warner (Mycroft), Marcia Lecky (Mrs Hudson), Will Brown (Lestrade), Christopher Akrill, Benjamin Harrold, Mervin Noronha, Andre Antonio, Paolo Guidi, Yuyu Rau, Theo Reece, Rakhee Sharma, Tamara Tare

Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, Inner Circle, London NW1 4NU

Running until 6 June 2026

Tickets at openairtheatre.com