Mr. William Gillette and Sherlock Holmes
Mr. William Gillette and Sherlock Holmes is an article published in Manchester City News on 10 may 1902.
About the play Sherlock Holmes at the Theatre Royal, Manchester, UK.
Mr. William Gillette and Sherlock Holmes
[THEATRE ROYAL.]
Mr. William Gillette, the American actor, has shown us this week Dr. Conan Doyle's famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, on the stage in the play of that name. It is a clever and satisfying portrait, and has, too, some of the elements of novelty, for Dr. Doyle has written around the hero an adventure which does not figure among those already published. It is the case of Miss Faulkner, and in chronological order would be placed immediately before the adventure in which Holmes and Professor Moriarty, the "king of crime," die together in the Alps. For Moriarty plays one of the three leading parts in the present story. It is sufficient to say of the plot of the play entitled Sherlock Holmes that it deals with the recovery of a packet of compromizing letters — an idea taken in part from a previous story; that portions of the portrait and traits of the detective are also skilfully interwoven from familiar adventures; and that it shows Holmes in love. Judged from any literary or reasonable standard, however, the play is beneath contempt. It is the rankest of melodrama, and is about on the same level as Maria Martin, or The Murder in the Red Barn. East Lynne, for instance, is quite a classic by comparison. The probabilities and possibilities are outraged at every turn, and there is scarcely a vestige of reasonableness about the acts of any of the characters. Sherlock Holmes has, it is true, many exciting moments, and these are led up to most skilfully. The play, too, is beautifully stage-managed, and it is capitally played, except that the representative of Dr. Watson has a most ungrateful part in the caricature of the detective's friend which has been fashioned by the dramatist. That experienced actor, Mr. W. Abingdon, is in similar straits with the Professor, and it would be interesting to have his unbiassed opinion on the Professor's alleged powers as a bookkeeper and murderer. With such a play then, it is a rather extraordinary sign of the dramatic taste of the times to note that it filled the Lyceum Theatre nightly for eight months, and that it has packed to suffocation, at increased prices, the Manchester Theatre Royal on every performance this week, and has been received here with almost frenzied enthusiasm.
