The world isn’t short of new Sherlock Holmes stories. Several hundred have been written since Conan Doyle hung up his pen, and in the main they stick closely to the character of the original stories. So why is it that, when bringing Holmes to the stage, dramatists feel the need to give the famously asexual detective a love life? It started with the ill-fated Sherlock Holmes – The Musical, featuring a woefully miscast Ron Moody in platform heels (he was ...

Pros: Side-splitting comedy with a spine-tingling twist: thrilling. Cons: Some scenes seemed to suffer from a lack of rehearsal. As a big Sherlock Holmes fan I headed to the Jack Studio Theatre with great enthusiasm, to find out that I was in for a treat. This production of The Hound of the Baskervilles, in fact, is not only the gripping account of an uncanny murder and its unravelling by the astute detective. It is also the exhilarating behind the scenes ...