Sherlock Holmes & The Sign of Four
Review by Clare Phillips.
‘Sherlock Holmes and The Sign of Four’ transported the audience at Bury St Edmunds’ Theatre Royal back to Victorian London last night – not with elaborate sets or fancy backdrops, but through the medium of radio drama and an assortment of sound effects.
It was the legendary broadcaster Alistair Cooke who said he preferred radio to television because “the pictures are better”. But what happens when radio and stage drama collide?
It clearly works - because this is the second time that Colin Baker (‘Dr Who’, ‘The Brothers’) and Terry Molloy (‘The Archers’, ‘Dr Who’) have teamed up as Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson respectively, following their portrayal as the characters in a previous radio play on stage, ‘The Hound of The Baskervilles.’
In this classic adventure - ‘The Sign of Four’ - all of Sherlock Holmes’ powers of deduction are stretched in a mystery that was born in war-torn India and now stalks Victorian London, fuelled by the vengeance of a seemingly unstoppable cut-throat band. There’s murder, stolen treasure, a chase along the Thames and a mysterious accomplice with notably small feet.
Staged as a radio play, the characters perform with scripts in front of microphones as if in a studio.
As someone whose ‘day job’ is in radio, I did wonder if I would enjoy watching a stage version of a radio studio production. Also, I’ve always hesitated to watch productions with stars from Radio Four’s ‘The Archers’ in them, because the actor, I find, rarely looks anything like the character as I know them (and, in fact, the same is true here - Terry Molloy looks nothing like Mike Tucker who he’s played for more than 40 years.)
The characters are, of course, long-standing friends, which most who watch this play will probably already know. Molloy is a fabulous Doctor Watson, who narrates the story with Baker very much bringing Sherlock Holmes alive too, although perhaps a little too likeable - I expected Holmes to be a touch more arrogant and pompous.
But there’s an added depth with the fact that the two actors also go back a long way, having shared many episodes of ‘Dr Who’ in the mid-1980s, with Molloy as Davros to Baker’s Doctor.
The rest of the cast do a great job of playing a number of characters, with Kate Ashmead not only taking the role of Watson’s love interest, Miss Mary Morston, among others, but also producing the show. Martin Parsons, who adapted and directs the production, shows a versatile range of characters including Inspector Athelney Jones, while David Sandham, when he is not in one of his several roles, brings hackney carriage rides to life with (what I assume is) a pair of coconut half-shells.
Other sound effects are provided by Imogen Jones.
Occasionally, I closed my eyes to try to imagine I was listening to it on the radio rather than in a packed theatre, but on the whole it was better with my eyes open, and once or twice I thought the sound effects perhaps could have come in a touch earlier. But that’s a minor criticism.
It was an enjoyable production and a story well told with some first-class characters.
Sherlock Holmes & The Sign of Four was at Theatre Royal in Bury St Edmunds on 26 March 2026.
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