‘Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Symmetric Mailshot’ Entertains at Home (The NoPro Review)
CtrlAlt_Repeat’s latest scratches at the surface of immersion
Sherlock Holmes doesn’t do well in lockdown. He’s stir-crazy: violating curfew, wandering the city, desperate for a mystery to solve. Doctor John Watson is doing his best to mitigate the famous detective’s descent into boredom-induced madness by chairing webinars on the fundamentals of investigation with the interested public, logging in from his personal computer and engaging their affable landlady Mrs. Hudson to join and encourage group participation, but it’s all Watson can do to get Sherlock to even log in, let alone answer any questions. We attendees settle in for an evening with Dr. Watson and Mrs. Hudson, resigned to be guided by the shadows of the great man for what we think will be a crash course in inspection, when the mother of all conspiracies lands in our lap.
And we don’t even yet know a third of who’s involved.
In production company CtrlAlt_Repeat’s new feature titled Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Symmetric Mailshot, logged in to this Zoom webinar along with our hosts are fifteen fellow participants. It’s a distinctly large group (some log-ins have multiple guests so we actually number closer to twenty) and we’re encouraged to rename ourselves for anonymity and to interact via the chat box, rather than attempting to speak via the microphone. Essentially it begins as a play-along Q&A, with heavy characterization influences from BBC’s Sherlock as Watson takes us through the basics in a pandering, schoolmarmy manner — “here’s a roleplay, raise your hand if you think you know which of these two impressions is lying.” It feels like a classroom, and both his and Hudson’s hastily-delivered lessons aren’t yet encouraging active engagement from the audience while actor Edward Cartwright’s Cumberbatchian Sherlock sporadically and frenetically continues to interrupt the webinar’s progress. In fact, I feel so disconnected from what I’m watching that I turn off my own video output altogether: if the story is just being handed to me and I don’t need to provide any feedback, my reactions don’t really matter and my fellow attendees don’t need to see a live feed of me watching the screen and occasionally taking a sip of my drink.
It’s a clunky and unattractive start to what’s supposed to be an immersive experience. With few invitations to action so far and no rewarding positive interactions with the advancement of the plot, it feels like we’re just watching a stage play in three cameras: Holmes, Watson, and Hudson. It could conceivably be that the three actors live together and are managing to frame a play from three different rooms in their own house and garden — certainly commendable, but not particularly impressive.
(Mild spoilers follow.)
However, our webinar is soon crashed by an interloper — one of Sherlock’s contacts out in town. The information she’s brought for him is the starting point of a rabbit hole we’re about to go down: the scoop about an exclusive tech release that may bode ill for the British public. I run into an issue here as I’m working off a Chromebook and so can only use the web browser version of Zoom; without the actual software installed ,I’m unable to receive digital files shared by our hosts so I’m at a loss while the wider group inspects whatever files our contact has shared. Within they find some contact names, the release party details, and a company website to investigate. Once I convince someone to post links in the chat we’re off and running.
Before long we’ve got two different strands of inquiry to pursue: do we attempt to contact the company directly, or do we try to dig up some more details from the launch party venue? Luckily our large group is invited to split to cover both, and so we do: our numbers roughly halved after we’ve chosen which host we’d like to follow. Here we’re filtered into breakout Zoom rooms to investigate further, so it’s assumed that whatever is going on in the other “room” we’re missing out on while experiencing our own.
Our smaller group’s interactions with the launch venue’s host are heavily driven by Watson as I note that very few people are volunteering to engage directly; I wonder if the audience feels that regardless of what they do (or don’t do), the narrative is likely to move forward, similar to how the first act’s classroom-esque participatory invitations had no effect on the story. As the two performers’ conversation moves along without our help and the group gets the information we came for, a breakout room timer appears and we are eventually all sent back to reconvene with the other group.
Here is where the standout performances begin to appear: actor David Alwyn as Lestrade booms into our webinar like a steamroller, 110% character acting and immediately taking charge, sweeping a precious few of us away to further investigate the tech company. From what I gather there are two other potential tracks that are left behind as just one other audience member and I vote to follow the inspector. Here with just the three of us there’s much more agency; Lestrade invites us to turn on our audio output to talk directly with each other and I find myself now directly tasked with following the tech company’s url to find a contact phone number which Lestrade asks me to call on speakerphone so he and our teammate can listen in. Speaking to a contact on the other line I’m suddenly roleplaying as a reporter to get the information we need, and eventually the contact drops the call to “hack” into our Zoom meeting and speak with us directly. The agency continues; as our company contact is running out of time before his hacking is discovered, Alwyn takes a big step back and encourages us to ask our own questions and drive the conversation, even at the cost of precious minutes and our team not gleaning all the information we might have. As the countdown finally kicks us back to the main group and we know we didn’t get all the clues, I’m much more engaged and satisfied than I had been in the first story branch. We’re now at a cast list count of at least six (with no technical glitches experienced so far) and I know that there are more performers I haven’t yet seen; the production’s coordination is now beginning to be more impressive.
The final series of scenes are played out promenade-style with the entire audience collected and pulled along from room to room. There’s a bit more opportunity to engage — we’re invited to interrogate the last few witnesses ourselves and some audience members take this opportunity to roleplay more than we had at the beginning. We’re invited to dress up for a final infiltration of the launch party and many audience members rush to grab something decadent from their homes to put on. It’s still a big group, however, and some folks get favored for speaking turns more than others simply by virtue of having a video feed that’s higher in the Zoom rank and therefore more host visibility.
Towards the conclusion we uncover the full conspiracy, and immediately following the narratives resolution the actors perform a non-sequitur jig in the popular London style of Jacobean comedies, inviting the audience to dance along at home with them. It’s most likely intended to draw a definitive and physically disengaging line between the fictional alternate reality we’d been inhabiting for two hours and the real one we’re about to log off to return to with a fun and happy at-home “party with the cast.” However to me it strikes a more dissonant chord, undermining the hard character work that the actors have put in and deconstructing in an instant the strong personalities we’ve been privileged to acquaint on an intimate level.
In the end, it’s a huge cast for what’s on offer — a whopping parade of eleven different actors & feeds — far more than I’ve yet seen during lockdown theatre. The coordination and execution of that many hosts really is impressive, leading audience members down six potential paths through the story which uses the Zoom breakout rooms & associated kick-out timers for great narrative results. There are supplementary digital props (websites, phone numbers, online contact forms that send emails back to you) but some of these are not accessible right away if you don’t have Zoom downloaded; someone will need to share them via the chat.
As far as entertainment goes, if you’re more of a voyeur and prefer to lean back and let the actors drive the narrative then CtrlAlt_Repeat has put together a complex and well-delivered production that holds interest and keeps pace with any promenade-style site-responsive show. I maintain that there were perhaps too many audience members to provide fulfilling levels of agency throughout the entire performance, and some characters were more accommodating than others at enabling the audience to take full advantage of what few opportunities there were.
There are however scattered nuggets of true immersion that, similar to gold veins running through stone, tantalise the audience to keep digging. With a little more back-end R&D, CtrlAlt_Repeat could have the public banging down their door for more cases and more chances to fall in with the Baker Street Irregulars.
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Symmetric Mailshot continues through July 5. Tickets are £11.37 — £19.46.
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