The Great Doyle Impersonation
The Great Doyle Impersonation is a review written by Doug Elliott published in Canadian Holmes (Vol. 14 No. 2, Winter 1990).
The article reviews Mark McPherson's one-man show An Evening with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, praising its research, wit, and engaging portrayal of Conan Doyle while noting that it remains more a public lecture than a deep revelation of the "inner man." The article emphasizes McPherson's effort, encouraged by Dame Jean Conan Doyle and helped by Jeremy Brett and Jeremy Paul, to restore attention to Conan Doyle himself — "the other doctor" — beyond the overwhelming shadow of Sherlock Holmes.
The Great Doyle Impersonation
Doug Elliott experiences the October 20 presentation of "An Evening with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle".
"On the lecture platform, Conan Doyle is a stationary figure, his chief gesture being that of pulling a red handkerchief from between his broad expanse of shirt front and his vest. His voice is loud in volume, but mixed in tone. His words sound a mixture of Scotch, English, Irish, and cold, but for all this Dr. Doyle was listened to last night with deep interest. He was talking of himself and his works, which are himself."
This was written by a Toronto reporter in 1894 during Conan Doyle's first lecture tour of America. it was in November of that year that he first lectured in Toronto (at the new Massey Music Hall). There were to be future visits to Toronto, and one might be forgiven for suggesting that the latest was on Saturday, October 20, 1990.
About 80 Bootmakers and others gathered to witness Mark McPherson's one man presentation of "the lecture that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never gave. It is some time in the 1920's, and the American impresario Major Pond has once again pre vailed upon Conan Doyle to embark on a lecture tour. ...
Spiritualism is not the major topic of the evening as it was in the actual lectures of the period. Instead, Conan Doyle looks back on his life and works. The first of the two acts takes us up to the creation of Sherlock Holmes; the second act makes brief mention of his other works, but in the main it is dominated by Holmes.
There is much to be mined from Conan Doyle's early life, as Owen Dudley Edwards has brilliantly proved, and McPherson's material is wide-ranging: the influence of Conan Doyle's mother, his school days at Hodder and Stonyhurst, his university career, and his early years in medical practice. There are many bright moments in the first act, such as when Conan Doyle adopts the stooped stance and high-pitched brogue of his teacher Dr. Joe Bell, using "the method" to deduce a patient's personal and medical history.
The second act gives us more of the same: his astounding success with the Holmes stories in the Strand and, later his failed attempts to wean his publishers from Holmes by demanding higher and higher fees. Although at times McPherson seems hesitant, he is for the most part comfortable in the role, and brings us an engaging Conan Doyle with a sharp wit and a keen sense of justice. With evident glee he recalls his first meeting with William Gillette — in full Holmes garb — at an English railway station. With a twinkle in his eye, he tells of a near-disastrous attempt at humour with the tax-man. With apparent sadness he tells of Charles Doyle's illustrations for A Study in Scarlet of a detective who is not clean-shaven as his son imagined him, but bearded as the father was himself.
McPherson has, I believe, got the outer man down well, and is betrayed only rarely by his own American accent. He has done his homework, reading the biographies carefully and studying with the actor's ear and eye the few remaining films and recordings of his subject. He has benefit ted, too, from the help and encouragement of one of the most astute students of Conan Doyle during his life: his daughter, Dame Jean Conan Doyle.
The idea may have been there before, but it took form during a visit by McPherson to Dame Jean's London flat in 1987. There he realized that they shared a concern for the injustice that has been done to Sir Arthur, ironically by those who seek to honour him. While Sherlock Holmes has taken on a sort of independent life through Dr. Watson's tales, his creator has fallen into the shadows. McPherson found him self talking of the need to remind people of the many remarkable achievements of "the other doctor" in Holmes's life.
"What would you think," was his tentative suggestion, "of bringing your father back to speak for himself to new audiences as well as those who think they know him well?"
He admitted then that he wanted not only to write the script for this presentation, but also to play the part himself. He left the meeting with Dame Jean's support for his project. Many long hours were spent creating a script, and many more long hours reviewing it with her, all the time learning more about his subject.
More help came from an unexpected quarter: when Jeremy Brett heard about McPherson's efforts, his first reaction was, "How can I help?" He and playwright Jeremy Paul read the script and offered many comments that were gratefully received. Tonight is the third presentation of McPherson's play, and the work shows evidence of diligent research and skilful writing. McPherson's Doyle is — as I knew it would have to be — immensely personable and at the same time damnably irritating in his total certitude about the correctness of his views. But that, after all, is the joy of Doyle: were he not so brilliant and likeable we would not be drawn to him; were he not so complex and rife with contradictions, we would not be bound to stay.
In tonight's play Conan Doyle reads from his poem "The Inner Room", with its ghostly images of subconscious alter egos. Little of the inner man escapes, however: we search in vain for the "savage" and the "saint". For the forum of the play is, after all, the public lecture, repeated over and over in countless lecture halls in countless faceless cities. A man would be a fool to bare his soul under such circumstances even if Sir Arthur, by 1920 an effortless public speaker, were inclined to do so.
And herein lies the fault, if there is any, with McPherson's "Evening". It is, in the end, a lecture. It is Sir Arthur doing Sir Arthur on the public stage. The artifice is buried beneath an extra layer from which the man himself cannot be revealed. The awkward meeting between the young Conan Doyle and his uncles over their proposal for him as a Catholic doctor is described matter-of-factly. Many of the other pivotal events in Conan Doyle's life — his ten-year love for Jean Leckie, his stormy friendship with Houdini, his painful conversion to spiritualism, his eight months on an Arctic whaler, his introduction to death on a grand scale in the Langman field hospital during the Boer War — are missing or underplayed here, and their effects, which were surely profound, go unnoted.
In the end this is a small point, and tonight I meet again with great enjoyment an old friend. The other Bootmakers in the audience also enjoy the reunion: they reward Sir Arthur with long and warm applause. I fancy that non-Sherlockian audiences, too, will find their introduction to "the other doctor" a most pleasant experience. And those Doyleans among us can be grateful to Mark McPherson for helping to spread the word.
- Article courtesy The Bootmakers of Toronto.
