Early in Portland Stage’s performance of “The Hound of the Baskervilles” Saturday night, it seemed as though a laugh line poking fun at “a Canadian” may simply have hit on an idiosyncrasy of the Maine audience, peculiarly primed for regional humor.

But it proved to be hardly an isolated burst of enjoyment during an evening when the audience and the players seemed particularly in sync.

These days, and throughout the years, it’s easy to find Sherlock Holmes and his trusty friend John Watson, on television, in movies and on stage. But this adaptation, by Britons Steven Canny and John Nicholson, vacuums up the pixie dust of popular culture and sprinkles it around time-tested physical comedy to make yet one more iteration immensely enjoyable.

Set designer Meg Anderson keeps things minimalist, allowing the actors’ antics and the sometimes oversized props to fill the stage.

This play takes on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s third and arguably most well known and appreciated crime novel featuring detective Holmes. Set on the moors in England’s West Country, it’s a tale of murder complicated by the lurking presence of a supernatural, perhaps even evil hound.

Dustin Tucker as Holmes (and others), Steven Strafford as Sir Henry Baskerville (and others), and Ryan Farley as the guileless Dr. Watson keep up a dizzying pace that follows Sir Doyle’s original tale to a surprising degree, considering the level of silliness.

To maintain this level of burlesque, and to get away with busting through the fourth wall — that imaginary barrier between the audience and the world the actors create — as often as this play does requires a tight ship by director Daniel Burson and steady control by the actors. Yet the actors, quite well cast in all their roles and getting a lot of work done in a glance as much as with a pratfall, don’t seem to show much constraint as they allow things to spool just out of control.

To be sure, they must also put great trust in their audience to hop along with them. This is a request extremely well suited for a dark January night, at a time when clownish characters in real life are running around places like Iowa and New Hampshire to much less comic effect. Saturday night’s audience was game for the ride.

Daphne Howland is a freelance writer based in Portland.