"IN a world full of mystery and deceit, the truth of who Sherlock Holmes really was will finally be revealed," promises Damian Freddi, Nightshade Productions' writer, director, narrator, fight choreographer and actor.

Holmes has found many homes, multiple incarnations, on screen and theatre stage and in the great outdoors. Now, stern stick in hand as he gathers the audience around him on the St Crux terrace, Freddi tells us we are labouring under an illusion, courtesy of The Strand, that in reality is "utter nonsense". "The hero protagonist figure?" he asks. "That man doesn't exist".

Forgive your reviewer this spoiler alert, but Nightshade's Sherlock is played by Amy Whitrod Brown, and it hardly requires detective powers to deduce she is a woman, albeit one who initially throws all and sundry off the scent by dressing and sounding like Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle.

Freddi loosely builds his promenading street-theatre premiere around a feminist reinvention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock tale, A Study In Scarlet, wherein doctor Jane Wilberfoss (Sarah Kerr) has returned from war service in Afghanistan, (and note the initials, JW, my dear Watson devotees).

We follow her quest around the Shambles market, King's Square and their environs to reunite with her troubled friend Lady Josephina Carmicle (Rose Muirhead), leading to her first encounter Whitrod Brown's game but abused Sherlock, a consulting detective for hire to feed an opium habit that has left her alone, addicted and alienated.

Freddi's narrator had warned of violence and bad language. The language, however, ventures no further than "bitch", and instead, some might consider the violence to be the "bad" element, or at least ham-fisted, albeit applied with a graphic-novel flourish as Sherlock suffers a beating from David Zezulka's Sergeant Drebber that doesn't sit quite right in the stomach.

Freddi may be seeking to depict Sherlock's reckless nature and the harder challenges faced as a woman in a man's world, but it feels heavy-handed by comparison with the mystery, deceit and false leads (step forward Richard Thirlwall's Inspector Lestrade), culminating in a witty finale that sets up the possibility of more Sherlock adventures from Nightshade.

Full marks, meanwhile, for navigating the intrusions of picture-taking Japanese tourists, fish and chip-munching passer-bys and cheeky boys on bikes with such elan.

Sherlock Holmes: A Study In Scarlet, Nightshade Productions, gathering nightly at 7pm, Golden Fleece Inn, Pavement, York, until August 13. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk