A Sherlock Carol
This review of ‘A Sherlock Carol’ is from November 2022. ‘A Sherlock Carol’ returns for 2024.
Why the hell are there so many productions of ‘A Christmas Carol’ in London?
There’s a moment in this misbegotten attempt to cut and shut Sherlock Holmes and ‘A Christmas Carol’ that has stayed with me, through the journey home and the long marches of the night. ‘What’s the matter?’ asks the sister – played by a white actor – of her brother, – played by a Black actor – ‘you look pale.’ Titters from (some of) the audience. I don’t know what I’m not getting here, but this doesn’t feel like some super-sophisticated piece of meta-woke prejudice-baiting. It just feels like old-fashioned 1970s-TV ‘comedy’.
This is an extreme example of the tone-deafness of off-Broadway import ‘A Sherlock Carol’, but there’s no shortage of others. Briefly, Holmes – troubled by the spectre of his nemesis Moriarty – is called upon to investigate the death of the wealthy Londoner Ebenezer Scrooge. In exorcising his own demons, he solves the case.
It’s not that bad an idea. You could – squinting – see Conan Doyle as a popular-fiction heir to Dickens, with characters and phrases that have entered our collective culture. But you get the feeling that writer/director Mark Shanahan really likes Sherlock Holmes and maybe isn’t that into Dickens. Most of ‘A Sherlock Carol’ is just a Holmes story made from parts of other ones. The Dickens-y bits are generic festiveness and some ghosts, and there aren’t really...