On Friday October 2, 2015 at 7:30 p.m. the Performing Arts Center of Stockton University hosted The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The play was put on by the Aquila Theatre Company. The play covered three stories about Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. However, there was a twist; in this play Sherlock Holmes was reimagined as a woman.
Act I began with the story “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.” This story was focused on a governess who took a position with a strange couple. The couple offered to pay her an extraordinary amount of money to take care of only one child, but she also had to do other strange tasks like sit with her back to the window and cut her hair. She goes to Holmes to find out why the couple is acting so strangely. It turns out the couple was pretending the governess was their daughter in order to stop the marriage between their daughter and a man, so the parents could keep the daughter’s money.
The other story in Act I was “The Adventure of the Yellow Face.” A man comes to Holmes needing her help to figure out why his wife asked for a large sum of money and was disappearing during the night to a cottage on his street. The man was also seeing a strange face in the window of the cottage his wife was going to. With the help of Holmes, the man discovers that his wife was hiding her child in the cottage. The man had thought the husband and child had died in America, but in reality the daughter had survived. Since the daughter was black the wife hid her out of fear. However, she had nothing to fear because the husband was accepting of her child.
After a short intermission, Act II began with “A Scandal in Bohemia.” The story starts with a man wearing a mask coming to Holmes for help. The man who is the King of Bohemia does not fool Holmes with his mask, and tears it off and tells his secret to Holmes and Watson. The King needs Holmes’s help to retrieve a picture of himself from a past lover, Irene Adler. This picture would be harmful to the King in regards to his engagement to the daughter of the King of Scandinavia. Holmes begins following Irene and is even the witness at her wedding. Holmes fails to retrieve the picture from her intellectual match, but Irene promises not to show the picture to anyone.
Despite the nor’easter and potential hurricane the theatre was nearly full of students and members of the community. Everyone who went to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes seemed to have enjoyed the play. There was laughter and drama throughout the play. The actors did a wonderful job, even though there were only five actors in the company so each actor had multiple roles to fill. It was a pleasure to see such versatile actors putting on an entertaining play.