Actor Bo Poraj inherits Sherlock Holmes’s deerstalker as the Christmas comedy heads to London

For the better part of two decades, comedy partners Humphrey Ker and David Reed have circled Baker Street. They pastiched Holmes and Watson in the radio work of their troupe The Penny Dreadfuls long before they built a full Christmas whodunnit around them, and when Sherlock Holmes and the Twelve Days of Christmas had its world premiere at Birmingham Rep last winter, they kept the two best parts for themselves: Ker in the deerstalker, Reed as Watson. The London season at Alexandra Palace Theatre is where the play has to prove it can survive without its authors on stage.

That job now falls to actor Bo Poraj, familiar to British audiences from the sitcom Miranda, as Holmes, and to Olivier Award nominee Marc Antolin (The Producers) as Watson. Around them the producers have assembled a company of comic character actors: Vivien Parry as Mrs Hudson, John Ramm as Lestrade, Mischief Theatre’s Charlie Russell as Athena Faversham, the rival detective, and Mia Jerome as Queen Victoria. Jonnie Broadbent, Annabel Brook, Wayne Cater, Olivia-Faith Kamau, Mia Overfield, Emily Pithon and John-Luke Roberts complete the roster, with Edward Bourne and Margot Jardine as swings.

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The premise is seasonal pastiche. In a Victorian West End where performers keep dropping dead mid-scene, Holmes spots a pattern in the old counting carol and has to race the killer through theatreland, saving French hens, recovering gold rings and rescuing Mother Goose, while Watson and Faversham try to keep him alive long enough for pudding. The cast list sets the register: two roles are named Fafner and Wotan, after Wagner.

In the announcement, Antolin pitches it as “the Sherlock and Watson you know, but wrapped in tinsel, stuffed with jokes, and tied together with phenomenal songs.” Poraj calls it “one of the funniest scripts I have read in a long time.” The writers promise goodwill to all, plus “a series of gruesome and elaborate killings,” and relish staging an original Holmes adventure in “the actual Victorian theatre where they film Jools Holland.”

The music is where the show has quietly changed. In Birmingham the songs were credited to Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, a pairing that made headlines because the two had rarely written together since Evita. The London billing credits Rice alongside Howard Goodall, the composer known for Blackadder and The Vicar of Dibley; the announcement does not mention Lloyd Webber or explain the switch. Phillip Breen directs again, with design by Mark Bailey, choreography by Georgina Lamb and illusions by Chris Fisher and Will Houstoun. The producers are the team behind Mark Gatiss’s A Christmas Carol, a festive fixture at the same venue.

The season runs at Alexandra Palace Theatre in north London from 24 November 2026 to 17 January 2027, with press night on 1 December. Tickets start at £20, there is an audio-described performance on 12 January and a captioned matinee on 3 January, and the show carries an age recommendation of 10 and up.

Ker and Reed are hardly leaving the detective business: Ker is developing Ludwig for a US pilot and Reed is developing The Adventures of Tintin for the BBC. The more interesting case this Christmas is whether their Holmes, written for their own timing, holds up in someone else’s hands.

Tags: Alexandra Palace Theatre, Bo Poraj, Christmas shows, David Reed, Howard Goodall, Humphrey Ker

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