We’re not in full-blown summer silly season yet but we’re certainly edging towards it, which means a West End filler berth for this benign twaddle about the world’s favourite detective.

Jeremy Paul’s oddly uneven two-hander was first performed in 1988 by Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwick, the Holmes and Watson pairing from the acclaimed ITV series. Unfortunately, for Robert Daws (Watson) and Peter Egan (Holmes), there’s no comforting televisual link to sustain the drama this time around.

What appeared less than elementary to me was quite who the target audience for this show might now be. The two halves, for a start, appear to be pulling in different directions. The first part is largely a whistle-stop tour of the pair’s lives and combined careers fighting crime, with key characters in the canon name-checked.

It’s fine as far as it goes but aficionados are likely to feel, very quickly, that they’ve heard all this before. Those with a passing, but not obsessive, interest will be best served, especially if recovering from the travesty that was the recent Robert Downey Jr/ Jude Law film.

You’ll need to be up to Sherlock speed for the second, far darker half. Paul presents a dense and knotty thesis about Holmes and his relationship with Moriarty, explored via the aftermath of Holmes’s supposed death at the hands of his arch-nemesis at the Reichenbach Falls. If Conan Doyle could bring his creation back to life, Paul can too, but this particular resurrection doesn’t score overly highly in the plausibility stakes.

Nonetheless, director Robin Herford has created a suitably brooding atmosphere for a largely introspective work, which reveals that the greatest mystery Holmes has to contend with is that of his own obsessive character. There’s a sure sense of the symbiotic, latently homoerotic relationship between the two men, as they prowl comfortably around their book-lined Baker Street rooms.

Daws has a nice line in bristling indignation and bruised pride, and gives every suggestion of a man resigned to the fact that his deductions, no matter how well worked through, will never match those of his brilliant friend. Egan is rather too much of a smoothy-chops for the complexity of Holmes, although his attractive face occasionally contorts into a terrifying grimace. His commanding delivery manages to render even banal sentences striking, as well as slightly suggestive. A passable, if deerstalker-free, couple of hours.

Until September 11. Information: 0844 412 4659, nimaxtheatres.com