Potted Sherlock

How to review a show that admits its own limitations as readily as this? Of course it’s impossible to do justice to the 60 Holmes novels and short stories in 70 minutes, a fact that’s laid out in Dan and Jeff's argumentative introduction. Within 15 minutes, they’ve also taken the mick out of their crowd-pleasing decision to shoehorn the “minor sub-character” of Moriarty into every other scene, by having him enter—albeit amusingly—at the suggestion of “more tea”.

Most crucially, Jeff somewhat sheepishly admits that there’s no way that they can convey the air of mystery and excitement of any single Holmes story when their company’s modus operandi is to “take someone else’s creativity and stamp all over it with lots of silly hats and wigs.”

There’s no denying the bewildering professionalism and slickness of this production, with its gorgeous faux-Victorian staging, super-quick costume changes and enormously high gag rate. There are plenty of laughs here, particularly when they turn their attention to the thinness and artificiality of some of the original plots (similarly to the Potted team, Conan Doyle was brilliantly professional, but also something of a slave to his own brand).

But no amount of fake corpsing or staged improv-style games can inject the show with any real sense of anarchy; and while I don’t doubt that the team love the original books, most of this affection is lost in a barrage of daftness that could be overlaid on to just about any story or franchise. The audience reception suggests that the team are assured success for a while to come, but they’d do well to remember that even potted goods can go stale.