The Hound Of The Baskervilles

It’s all gone a bit Sherlockian recently! Wellington Repertory Theatre are performing The Hound Of The Baskervilles at the Gryphon Theatre, so we went along. It was a Sunday matinee performance at 3:00pm, so we went for a late lunch at Concord.

I thought I’d booked us a table, but it turns out my fat fingers had hit the calendar a week from now, so there was no booking. This wasn’t a problem, as they had space at 1:30pm, but it did mean that they hadn’t got my message about reserving one of their Burger Wellington burgers for me! And guess what? Yup, they’d sold out. Bugger. I had a Caesar salad instead.

Gryphon Theatre is on Ghuznee Street, and Uncle Google reckoned that was a 14 minute walk away. I’m not sure what route Uncle Google was taking, because we covered it in a more realistic seven minutes.

The theatre was sold out, as the usher told us, so we were enjoined not to leave gaps of a seat between the groups, as they needed all the seats. The stage set was minimal, almost bare, with only a few chairs brought on as required from time to time. The script followed the original pretty faithfully, and keeping Dr. Watson as the main character rather than Holmes himself – indeed, for a substantial section in the middle of the play, Holmes is purportedly in London, not Devonshire. It is Watson who befriends Sir Henry Baskerville, and interrogates the other characters, sending his thoughts to Holmes in London by letter. Holmes does eventually turn up, and the pair of them instigate a plan to uncover the real reason why the hound is instilling such fear into the locale.

Yes, well, we all know how it ends, and they wrap up the plot in a no-nonsense fashion and return to London. We also wrapped up the plot and returned to Miramar.