WINTER'S dark cloak is hung up on a peg in a distant dressing room for now, but one familiar pantomime face is back at York Theatre Royal already.

Villain supreme David Leonard is to play Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's perennially popular consulting detective in Sherlock Holmes: The Hound Of The Baskervilles, this summer's enterprising romp of a murder mystery for all the family.

Last seen cadging sweets off the unsuspecting front row when playing regal rodent Herman Vermin in Dick Whittington And His Meerkat in the National Railway Museum's Signal Box Theatre, on temporary Theatre Royal manoeuvres last Christmas, Leonard will take the lead role of Holmes from next Friday to August 27.

Directed by artistic director Damian Cruden, the new retelling of Conan Doyle’s detective novel will be a “wildly entertaining version told by a travelling troupe of lightning-fast Victorian players”.

"How Damian first pitched it to me, I thought it was going to be a straight play, but there are lots of actor-musician companies now and Damian wanted to build the show around the notion of a Victorian theatre company that would travel up and down the country, run by an actor-manager and his wife, with the same company staying together for years," says David.

"So we're looking at staging The Hound Of the Baskervilles with a music-hall flavour and actor-musicians playing washboards, spoons, trumpets etcetera, while Mark Walters, the brilliant designer from Dick Whittington last Christmas, has come up with a wonderfully fluid set design."

York Press:

Rachel Dawson, left, Elexi Walker, David Leonard, Ed Thorpe, Joanna Holden and Rob Castell gather for rehearsals for The Hound Of The Baskervilles. Picture: Anthony Robling

Director Damian Cruden and his cast have been working in tandem with writer Richard Hurford to devise the script over a four-week period, working on ideas in the rehearsal room that Hurford has then edited into a formal structure.

"This is the first devised piece I've done, but actors are normally good at coming up with things and for this show there are people in the cast who have worked with companies like Kneehigh and Cirque du Soleil, so they have lots of skills," says David, who will head up a cast of six actor-musicians playing a variety of different roles in a show that uses music, shadow puppetry and the magic of theatre to tell the tale of the dreaded hound on the foggy Dartmoor estate of the newly dead Sir Charles Baskerville.

"The piece has the feel of the Tiger Lillies' junk opera, Shockheaded Peter, to it but pitched at eight year olds and upwards, even though it's quite dark," he adds.

David has greatly enjoyed preparing his role of Holmes, not least the chance to read Conan Doyle's works. "I read The Hound Of The Baskervilles, as we all did, but then I read others too as I didn't know his work that well, and I found I couldn't put them down as they're real page turners," he says. "Because his detective novels are so economical, not long-winded unlike some of his other writing, they're still loved as they're such cracking stories."

Cruden's production will be "a bit more serious" than Peepolykus's celebrated comic adaptation of The Hound Of The Baskervilles from 2007. "More serious, but definitely with some humour in it, but mainly we want to introduce children to the detective story, Sherlock Holmes and powers of deduction in an age when it was perceived science could solve everything," says David.

He is following in the steps of a multitude of actors who have played Holmes, from Basil Rathbone and Peter Cushing to Jeremy Brett and Robert Downey Jnr and onwards to Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller. "Holmes might be supercilious but he's a brilliant reasoning machine who lives for solving crimes and that's what makes him such a great detective, who's still so popular," says David.

"Conan Doyle was the first writer to have a detective use powers of deduction, reasoning, science and forensic science, who could just look at someone and work out their profession by their clothes, their fingernails, their voice. People love detective stories, especially the British, where riddles can be solved but only within that hermetically sealed world, and Holmes was the master of doing that."

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes in The Hound Of The Baskervilles, York Theatre Royal, July 29 to August 27. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk