There was a particular pleasure in watching Joshua James stalk the lawn at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, breath hanging in the cold May air, announcing that the game was afoot. Joel Horwood’s new mystery, loosely woven from The Sign of Four, opened the 2026 season to deserved acclaim before closing earlier this month. It was madcap, atmospheric and visually inventive, and it did something the better Holmes adaptations always attempt. It interrogated the world that produced the detective rather than merely costuming it.

Critics noted that the production set its conspiracy against a London devouring everything in its path, and read the Holmes myth through the lens of colonialism, racism and class. That is the honest reading of Conan Doyle. The Sign of Four turns on a stolen Agra treasure, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and the long shadow the British Empire cast over the lands it administered and imagined. The jewel that arrives at Baker Street is never only a jewel. It is the accumulated weight of........

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