SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE LAST ACT

In The Last Act, Sherlock Holmes reminisces on his life in the aftermath of the passing of his dear friend John Watson.

The first act of The Last Act sees Holmes taking the listener through an almost auto-biographical potted history of his time with Watson, complete with snippets and memories of familiar cases.  Familiar to the ears of Holmes aficionados, but also to more casual acquaintances of Conan Doyle’s most famous creation.

We’re taken through Holmes’ first meeting with Watson from A Study in Scarlet through to Holmes’ fateful meeting with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls in The Final Problem, including highlights from other adventures such as The Speckled Band, The Abbey Grange, and more.

The second act of The Last Act mixes Holmes’ return from apparent death in with recollections of his own past before he met Watson, including memories of his less than ideal upbringing.  Here we’re guided through the salient points of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and Holmes’ personal delight at being back at Baker Street sleuthing with his friend once more.

Time moves on however and, as the years change around him, Holmes finds himself increasingly stuck in his own time.  He ultimately retires, being called upon for help one final time on the eve of the first World War.  And this brings us up-to-date with the fate of Watson.

Holmes, and all the other voices here, is portrayed by the late Roger Llewellyn.  Llewellyn had taken The Last Act on tour between 1999 and 2014 and Big Finish had the opportunity to record a two-CD audio version in 2009, before following it up with the second of writer David Stuart Davies’ one-man stage plays – Sherlock Holmes: The Death and Life.

I have hesitated to listen to these before now because, like most Holmes’ fans I would presume, the idea of listening to Sherlock Holmes for up to 2 hours without his Watson sounds like an audio version of purgatory.  However, I have recently been accompanying my runs with Big Finish audios, and a 13-mile run seemed the ideal time to listen to this first offering.

In terms of story and production, The Last Act is, in turns, excellent and difficult.  On the plus side, the excellent side, Roger Llewellyn gives us a very real Holmes that’s trapped in a morose and sombre world of his own making.  He’s lost everything, and so misses that which he may not previously have acknowledged as being worthy of loss.  This sad Sherlock is different to our usual abrasive, brash, and arrogant man of intellect, observation, and deduction, but he is still the same man for just those reasons.

As a one-man play, Llewellyn is called upon to deliver over a dozen more voices throughout the narrative. Whilst he does a fantastic job of keeping all of those voices distinctive enough such that the characters are all well defined (not providing distinction between voices is a common bugbear of audio adventures), the almost caricature nature of the voices/accents makes them far less convincing than Holmes himself. However, as Llewellyn himself points out in the behind-the-scenes interviews, these are voices from Holmes, not from Roger Llewellyn so, if they are unconvincing, even comical, blame the character, not the actor.

The only other negative here is that the ending seems to go on for too long, and Holmes’ succumbing to despair and sorrow just does convince.  Maybe it’s the lack of visuals, or the audio medium not presenting what Llewellyn is delivering, I couldn’t say for sure, but I found myself at times just wishing it would end. Everything that needed to be said had already been said, and the end was just being dragged out for longer than it could sustain.

However, for the most part, this is quite an absorbing play with enough fan-pleasing name-drops of past adventures to trigger fond memories.  If you’re not a fan of Holmes, you may find it far more difficult to sit through the entire duration.