Why Sherlock Holmes play Baskerville at Hong Kong’s Fringe Club will make you laugh a lot
Five actors play 35 characters in Ken Ludwig’s farcical adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, starring Ivan Idzik, Warren Adams, Davina Lee Carrete, Jacqueline Gourlay Grant and Hamish Campbell
Sherlock Holmes made his first appearance in print in 1887 and is still going strong 130 years later.
In just the last decade, the Sherlock television series starring Benedict Cumberbatch, two films starring Robert Downey Jr, and the Elementary television series in which Jonny Lee Miller plays the detective have all been produced.
There is a tongue-in-cheek element to most recent interpretations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s drug-addicted forensic genius. A play called Baskerville, however, takes him into out-and-out farce, and is now getting its Hong Kong premiere courtesy of Candice Moore’s Sweet and Sour Productions.
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Opening on October 18 at the Fringe Club’s Underground Theatre, this comedy by Ken Ludwig promises to take Sweet and Sour Productions into new dramatic territory.
“It’s very different from what I’ve done before,” says director and founder Moore, who has previously directed dramas such as The Elephant Song, Venus in Fur and Doubt. “It’s based on The Hound of the Baskervilles, but it’s a comedy. It’s a classic tale but done differently. Slapstick, farce, mystery – it’s got everything.”
Published in 1901 and narrated in the voice of Holmes’s almost equally famous sidekick, Dr John Watson, The Hound of the Baskervilles is probably the best known of the Sherlock Holmes novels, although there are comparably famous short stories.
Much of the action takes place on Dartmoor, a vast area of moorland in southwest England, where Sir Henry Baskerville, who has an estate there, is believed to be in imminent danger from a hellhound summoned by an ancient curse.