About Stage Villains
About Stage Villains is an article published in The Boston Globe on 24 february 1901.
About the play Sherlock Holmes at the Hollis Street Theatre, Boston, MA, USA.
About Stage Villains
William Gillette Discourses on Their Value in Melodrama.
There is little likelihood that Mr Gillette will be seen here after his present engagement for some time to come. His contracts are such that after playing Boston and a few other cities he goes to England, and will play "Sherlock Holmes" for the year in London.
In his dressing room last night, while his Japanese valet assisted him in his change of costume, he said: "It is hard to tell when I will be in this city again. For several years I have been spending my summers in England, generally occupying my vacation with hard work, but next summer I shall adopt a different course. The English people will probably not see "Sherlock Holmes" until the autumn. In the meantime I shall continue to show him in this country."
Just then there was a sharp rush of something heavy past the door of the dressing room, in the inky blackness of the stage. "Only some scenery being swept up to the flies," explained the actor, and it may be said right here, by way of parenthesis, that one has but a faint notion of the great excitement and noiseless intensity of action under which the stage hands work. Mr Gillette's thrilling play and its remarkable environment of strange effects seems to infect even the stoical stage hands.
The actor admitted that there was an extraordinary amount of stage bustle of a subdued sort and excitement in the play, but declared that he did not mind it. "I am accustomed to it now, so that I cannot say I feel anything. I move through it in the calmest possible frame of mind."
Speaking of "Sherlock Holmes" as a play, Mr Gillette said: "Some of my friends express surprise that I should have undertaken so melodramatic a character after playing parts like the 'Private Secretary,' and they have rolled up their eyes in wonder at the villains. But what is better than good melodrama, and what makes a play more interesting than one or two good villains? The doings of the villains seem to me to form a very enjoyable part of the entertainment, especially as they are baffled. I hardly see how we could dispense with them or how the villain of the stage as a type could be dropped without a serious loss to the effectiveness of the acting drama. Some people have told me that they thought some of these villains were unreal, however realistically they are done, and some of the newspaper critics have intimated the same.
"What I want to know is whether these persons who have these opinions know much about thieves and blackguards. I sought hard and long for the types that you see in 'Sherlock Holmes' and I got them as nearly true to London and their class as I could. There are other kinds of realism than those of the drawing room and there is no doubt but that such villains as are depicted as battling for supremacy over Sherlock Holmes have their prototypes in the real life of great cities today. It is well enough to say that they don't exist, that they couldn't exist under the present police arrangements, but they do exist for all that and I have seen them and studied them."
