STAGE REVIEW : TYRANNY AT THE HEART OF HOLMES’ LAST HURRAH

Charles Marowitz’s original play “Sherlock’s Last Case” was one of the domestic highlights of last year’s Olympic Arts Festival in a production by the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre. Now Herbert J. Kendall and Gerald Roberts have brought the play into their New Mayfair Theatre, whose post-Victorian appointments (and proscenium stage) create a comfortable atmosphere for this tale of Holmesian intrigue, virtually none of whose details can be revealed without spoiling it some for the viewer.

Marowitz apparently has had a great deal of fun playing with the dry, arch, preternaturally gifted Holmes persona, and has supplied a number of opportunities for Holmes to come up with such elaborate and esoteric rationales that on a couple of occasions we applaud what in effect seem to be arias of deductive reasoning.

He’s also used the convention to fire off a number of aphorisms, some of which may be closer to his own heart than that of Victorian address (“The press invariably examines the hole rather than the doughnut” sounds very much like Marowitz, the often churlish author of letters to the editor).

“Sherlock’s Last Case” plays true to the decorousness with which people comported themselves in 19th-Century England (or at least what we’re told about the way people expressed themselves then), yet it attempts a very modern depiction of the arrogance of tyranny and the rage of the tyrannized, worked out here in the relationship between Holmes and Watson.

Marowitz never loses sight of the spoof’s imperatives--hidden irony and quick pace, but the quick pace here is not necessarily a light pace. Marowitz has fused Victoriana with his own Theater of Cruelty (of which Holmes’ reference to his servant Mrs. Hudson as “a stuffed saddlebag” is a small example).

You can see in the icily unrepentant and scornful Holmes a paradigm of the modern intellectual loner; you can also see a pretty nasty man. At the end, when he feels compelled to apologize for a cruelly manipulative ruse, his heart isn’t in it.

David Fox-Brenton, tall and elegant-looking (he resembles an overrefined Sean Connery), gives a good account of Holmes the suavely superior dispenser of cutting aphorisms, and Brenton’s silly, self-conscious smirk tells us how truly discomfited Holmes is when he’s not in control. Benjamin Stewart’s Watson is big-voiced, powerfully put-upon and clear, but Stewart, an actor who likes style and adornment, seems a little uncomfortable in the role of a blunt, somewhat bullish man who is never permitted a mot juste . His face looks tight; we don’t see a man of simple pleasures in whom dark thoughts gather.

Toni Lamond plays Mrs. Hudson, Judith Hansen plays Liza, a young actress, and James E. Brodhead plays a police inspector; all are very competent. That’s not an adjective actors like, but they could have been worse--and better. Marowitz directs. The good costumes are by Molly Maginnis, Jon Gottlieb did the witty sound, and the light design is by David C. Palmer and R. Craig Wolf. Michael Devine did the set. Holmes’ study is on the ersatz side, but that dungeon-like cellar is a tenebrous place (a rat scratches its way up the wall).

Performances Tuesdays through Sundays at 8 p.m., with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2:30 p.m., at 214 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica, 451-0621. Runs indefinitely.