Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Lipstick, Ketchup and Blood review – funny but overambitious

At first, you assume Lesley Hart’s play is a straight adaptation of A Research in Scarlet, the primary of Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels about Sherlock Holmes. True, there's something of the Nationwide Theatre of Brent concerning the enterprise; in Marc Small’s out of doors manufacturing, it's down to simply two actors to play not solely the consulting detective and his sidekick, John Watson, but in addition an assortment of coppers, children and corpses. It's humorous in its overweening ambition – blood-like tomato ketchup and all.

It does make a good stab at telling the story, although. That is the one concerning the physique present in Brixton, the phrase “rache” written on the wall and the ring that lures the potential offender.

But one thing else is askew. It transpires that Harry (Deirdre Davis) and Ash (Tom Richardson) have carried out this script so much. An terrible lot. That is their 183rd time. Apparently, nobody has ever seen them do it and but they proceed. By the top of the play, they're as much as 286.

Deirdre Davis in Sherlock Holmes: A Research in Lipstick, Ketchup and Blood. Photograph: Fraser Band

Of their neurotic repetition, they recall the characters in Enda Walsh performs similar to The Walworth Farceand The New Electrical Ballroom, as if by working by means of their script repeatedly, they'll have the ability to make sense of the chaotic world exterior. That world seems to have suffered an environmental disaster, leaving them stranded on a barren rock, even when the luxurious vegetation round us on the amphitheatre stage suggests in any other case.

“Perhaps it’s time we informed ourselves a unique story,” they counsel, however A Research in Scarlet is the one one they’ve acquired and so they should lean on its intelligent puzzle-solving and knotty American backstory within the useless hope of discovering which means for his or her lives. It's as if, in adapting the novel, Hart has confronted a double disaster; first concerning the limitations of theatre, and second concerning the limitations of the story itself.

If she has a connection in thoughts between Holmes’s “scarlet thread of homicide”, Ash’s former job as a haematologist and the blood-related sickness ravaging Harry’s physique, she doesn't totally clarify the hyperlink. Davis and Richardson give brilliant and entertaining performances, however, for all its ambition, the play has too many tales to inform.

• At Pitlochry Competition theatre till 7 July