"Sherlock Holmes" at the Lyceum Theatre

From The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia

"Sherlock Holmes" at the Lyceum Theatre is an article published in The Tatler on 18 september 1901.

The article is about the 1901 play Sherlock Holmes with William Gillette as Sherlock Holmes.


"Sherlock Holmes" at the Lyceum Theatre

The Tatler (18 september 1901, p. 573)

THE CHARACTERS


THE SCENES

Sherlock Holmes, being a hitherto unpublished episode in the career of the great detective and showing his connection with the strange case of Miss Faulkner. By A. Conan Doyle and William Gillette.

Produced at the Shakespeare Theatre, Liverpool, September 2; at the Lyceum Theatre, London, September 9.

The place is London.

The time ten years ago.

  • Act I. — Drawing-room at the Larrabees'. Evening.
  • Act II. — Scene 1: Professor Moriarty's Underground Office. Morning. Scene 2: Sherlock Holmes's Apartments in Baker Street. Evening.
  • Act III. — The Stepney Gas Chamber. Midnight.
  • Act IV. — Dr. Watson's Consulting-room, Kensington. The following evening.


An English actor in perspiring protest between the acts of Sherlock Holmes described the play which Mr. William Gillette has brought to town as "a Surrey-side melodrama played in whispers in the dark." In strict truth he is not far wrong; but the dark and the whispers make precisely all the difference in the world. If you begin to take Sherlock Holmes to pieces in a calculating way, or if you were to read it at your fireside, you would marvel that, out of the incident of the Faulkner letters anybody could write a play of four acts which would not be instantly dismissed as transpontine and untenable ; and yet Mr. Gillette's subtle appeal to the whole art of illusion (his spare figure, his pale face, his sad, low monotone, his sardonic reticence, and his extremely clever method of raising and lowering his curtain on a stage totally dark) gives his audience a thrill which I feel certain is not inherent in the play itself.

The secret of the story is not very profound although it is invested with an air of extraordinary mystery. A batch of old love letters are at stake, written by a count to a Miss Faulkner. Two adventurers, the Larrabees, are on the look-out for them as the basis of blackmail. Sherlock Holmes wants to get them on behalf of the writer, and their owner, the remaining Miss Faulkner, wishes to retain them out of a spirit of revenge. Here, then, you have a triangle of antagonistic interests complicated by the fact that while Sherlock Holmes wishes to defeat the Larrabees as dangerous criminals, he also hesitates to be cruel to Miss Faulkner. The complication increases when the Larrabees set in motion a dangerous train which will ultimately destroy the detective and interest the notorious king of criminals, Professor Moriarty, in their case.

The climax of the drama is reached in the third act when Holmes is enticed into a den at Stepney to obtain the (counterfeit) letters from Larrabee, and surrounded by a gang of would-be murderers is defended by Miss Faulkner (and his own intelligence). I have seen nothing since his own Secret Service so thrilling as this act. Picture a gaunt chamber, a deal table with a lamp on it; on one side five or six ruffians, on the other the detective chaffing them, and at his side a white, trembling girl. In the twinkling of an eye the detective lifts a chair, smashes the lamp, and in the instantaneous darkness which follows you hear a crashing of glass as he jumps through the window, dabbing his glowing cigar into the wall to divert attention for the time being. This is the sort of incident that I would go to see again and again although I am afraid I could hardly sit out the whole play, for the trick is at once audacious and adroit, and though you may despise yourself for being thrilled yet the thrill is undeniable.

Mr. Gillette gets all his efforts as an actor by the modicum of means he employs; and although I do not think he is so powerful as he was in Secret Service — out of sight the best melodrama that was ever written — he is exceedingly impressive even if his grim reticence is somewhat over-done. His reading, however, is most useful as a corrective to our own bawling methods in melodrama which the unhappy provincial playgoer has to listen to week after week. Mr. Gillette has trained his company to follow in his wake. Mr. W. L. Abingdon as the criminal professor has done nothing quite so striking for years. Nothing could be more tender than the Miss Faulkner of Miss Fealy, while Miss Granville shows unexpected power as the villainess.

I note that some critics deplore the fact that Sherlock Holmes should have been staged at the Lyceum. I see no reason to say amen. Sherlock Holmes shows us definitely that melodrama — that is to say, the play in which cause and effect are but distantly related — is not dead as a form. What has completely vanished is the crude Adelphi method of presenting it. Mr. Gillette has shown us that you can hold a house with an essentially melodramatic story without introducing ridiculous standards of conduct, without elaborate stage machinery. No words can express my contempt for the rude conduct of the gallery to the stranger within our gates on the first night.

J. M. B.





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