The Land of Shadows
The Land of Shadows is an article written by David Stuart Davies published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 1, No. 1) in september 1989.
The article surveys Arthur Conan Doyle's lifelong engagement with the theatre, from his youthful enthusiasm and early failures to his major stage successes with Waterloo, Sherlock Holmes, and The Speckled Band. It concludes that although theatre fascinated him and occasionally rescued him financially, Conan Doyle's true creative strength lay in prose, with his dramatic work remaining largely derivative and ultimately secondary.
The Land of Shadows
A Survey of Conan Doyle's involvement with the Theatre
Arthur Conan Doyle had a life-long fascination with the theatre. He visited it many times in his home city of Edinburgh and, as a schoolboy at Stonyhurst, he happily joined in the student play productions over the Christmas holidays. It was while he was still a schoolboy that he experienced the thrill and spectacle of the London theatre for the first time. In 1874 he went to stay with his father's sister, Annette, and during the three week visit he was taken to the theatre twice by his Uncle James. On each occasion they enjoyed the luxury of a box.
At the Lyceum (1), young Arthur was mesmerised by Henry Irving's portrayal of Hamlet. He wrote to his mother: 'Irving is very young and slim with black piercing eyes.' (Sherlock Holmes in embryo?). Conan Doyle was never to forget that dramatic portrayal of Shakespeare's tragic hero and twenty years later, he adapted one of his short stories, A Straggler of '15, into a one act play lasting thirty minutes for Irving. The old actor was delighted with the piece, changing only the title to 'Waterloo'. The play was dominated by the central character of a corporal, now aged ninety, recounting his experiences at the famous battle. Irving recognised it was a splendid character part and he played it with gusto.
- CORPORAL: Yes, I am a Guardsman, I am. Served in the 3rd guards, same they now call the Scotsguards. Lordy, Sergeant, but they have all marched away, from Colonel Byng right down to the drummer boys, and here am I, a straggler — that's what I call myself, a straggler. But it ain't my fault neither, for I've never had my call, and I can't leave my post without it.
The play was premiered at The Princess Theatre in Bristol in September 1894. Conan Doyle was in America at the tome on a lecture tour, so Bram Stoker, Irving's secretary, wrote to the author about the first night: 'Waterloo as an acting play is perfect and Irving's playing was the high water mark of histrionic art.'
To Conan Doyle, the success of Waterloo must have made up for his disastrous baptism of writing for the theatre which took place in 1893. He had formed a friendship with James Barrie who had been engaged by the D'Oyly Cartes to provide the libretto for a comic opera which was to fill the gap at the Savoy theatre left by the departure of Gilbert and Sullivan after they had quarelled with the management. Barrie became ill and, unable to continue with the work, he asked his friend to help.
It was an almost impossible task and Conan Doyle found himself burning the midnight oil rewriting the first two acts and completing the third, while keeping in constant touch with the composer, Ernest Ford.
Understandably, the show, Jane Annie; or the Good Conduct Prize, was a dismal failure. At the first night, Conan Doyle and Barrie shared a box and as they took their seats they were cheered by the audience. This was not the case at the end of the evening. In his autobiography Memories and Adventures Conan Doyle commented: 'The result was not very good. We were well abused by the critics, but Barrie took it all in the bravest spirit.'
The general praise for 'Waterloo' must have done much to eradicate the pain of the embarrassing failure of Jane Annie so much so that Conan Doyle was inspired to write more for the stage and, after completing A Question of Diplomacy a short piece based on one of his stories in Round the Red Lamp, he commenced work on an ambitious four act play set in the Regency period. The drama was to feature prize-fighting Regency bucks and it may be that it was this element that caused Irving, who had just received his knighthood, to reject it. The idea of such undignified exhibitions being staged at The Lyceum, the theatre of which he was the manager and sole licensee, would not be in keeping with his position as the first knight of the theatre.
The play was shelved, but Conan Doyle used much of his research material in his novel Rodney Stone. However 'Waterloo' continued to entertain and in 1897 it was chosen to be performed in honour of the Queen's Jubilee before the delegation of 2,000 soldiers representing different countries of The Empire.
Conan Doyle's next foray into the world of theatre resulted in the production of the most famous and enduring of his plays, although the final text was not his. This was the play Sherlock Holmes. After writing his first draft, he sent it to the actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Characteristically, he asked that the central character be rewritten to make him seem more like Beerbohm Tree than Sherlock Holmes. Understandably, Conan Doyle was reluctant to do this and rapidly lost interest. The whole project might have been dropped forever if Conan Doyle's literary agent had not sent the play to American Impressario, Charles Frohman who saw its potential and accepted it.
Again rewriting was demanded, this time by the American actor William Gillette who was anxious to play Holmes. Conan Doyle was so indifferent to the whole idea by this time that when he received a telegram from Gillette asking permission to 'marry Holmes', he sent this now famous reply: 'You may marry or murder or do what you lke with him.'
In the Autumn of 1899, Gillette arrived in England with is adaptation of the play to gain Conan Doyle's approval. He got it. Indeed Conan Doyle thought that Gillette had 'turned it into a fine play'. The drama was described as an hitherto unpublished investigation: The Strange Case of Miss Faulkner. However, the plot relied heavily on A Scandal in Bohemia and The Final Problem and the play is littered with quotations from other Holmes stories. The most striking innovation being, of course, Holmes' romance. At the end of the play, he says to the heroine:
- 'Your powers of observation are somewhat remarkable, Miss Faulkner... and your deduction is quite correct. I suppose... indeed I know... I love you. I love you'.
It is perhaps for this that the play was billed as a comedy.
Despite mixed reception from the press the play was very popular with theatre audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. William Gillette was the first actor to make a career out of playing Sherlock Holmes and indeed he was still playing the character on stage at the age of 77! The two elements that Gillette brought to the Holmes mythology were the florid dressing gown and meerschaum pipe. The meerschaum was originally used, so the story goes, in order that Gillette could rest the bow! of the pipe on his shoulder, thus enabling him to Keep it m his mouth while still speaking his lines. The play is still performed today and it was successfully revived on the London and Broadway stages in the 1970's.
Once Conan Doyle had lost interest in writing the Holmes play, he returned to his adaptation of a novel by James Payn, the old editor of Cornhill Magazine who had given him his first chance with that publication. The book called Halves was the story of two brothers: it was presented on the London stage in early 1898 with modest success. Payn, who died in March of that year, never saw the dramatisation of his work.
Conan Doyle next adapted another of his characters for the stage and early in 1906 Brigadier Gerard was staged at The Imperial Theatre. Lewis Waller appeared as the Brigadier and it was perhaps his miscasting that resulted m the play being only a modest success. Waller was a matine idol of the day, an actor who had been seen as Monsieur Beaucaire and D'Artagnan. His adoring public were mystified and disappointed to see him as this comic character.
Waller appeared to better effect in Conan Doyle's next play The Fires of Fate. As 'A Morality Play in Four Acts', it was a spectacular adaptation of The Tragedy of Korosko. Waller played the part of Colonel Egerton who, given only a short time to live by his doctor, travels to Egypt and becomes a hero in protecting a group of river-boat tourists when they are captured by rebel dervishes.
The play opened on June 16th 1909 at The Lyric and ran until the late Autumn of that year. It was the success of The Fires of Fate that prompted Conan Doyle to risk his own money in putting on his shelved drama about prize-fighting. For this 'Melodrama of the Ring' he leased the Adelphi Theatre for six months.
The House of Temperley was a spectacular production with seven sets and forty-three speaking parts. One can but imagine how nervous this theatrical gamble made Conan Doyle feel as the first night curtain went up on December 27th 1909; but the audience loved it and greeted the author's curtain speech with prolonged cheers.
However as the New Year arrived, so did a set of problems which cut short the life of this play. Women stayed away feeling that it was not quite lady-like to be entertained by an exhibition of prize-fighting, even though it was acted. The illness of the King also dampened people's enthusiasm for high-spirited entertainment. Despite Conan Doyle adding a one act play adapted from his story A Pot of Caviare as a curtain raiser to Temperley, the audiences continued to dwindle. Finally, Edward VII died and the play had to close.
Conan Doyle was left with a tremendous deficit on his hands. Once more he turned to Sherlock Holmes. A month after the curtain fell on The House of Temperley it rose again on The Speckled Band. This version of the famous Holmes tale, with many additions and alterations, successfully paid off Conan Doyle's theatrical debts.
Holmes was played by H. A. Saintsbury who had toured in the Gillette play. Grimesby Roylott (sic) was created for the stage by Lyn Harding, who specialised in bizarre villains. He played the same role in the 1931 film The Speckled Band opposite Raymond Massey's Holmes, and he was Professor Moriarty in two of the Arthur Wontner Holmes films: The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (1935) and Silver Blaze (Murder at the Baskervilles (US) ) (1937).
During rehearsals for The Speckled Band Conan Doyle watched Lynn Harding flesh out his villain with unease. He did not like what Harding was doing with Roylott; he thought the actor was overdoing the neurotic, eye-rolling idiosyncracies of the character. James Barrie told his friend not to worry. He was right: Harding's portrayal was a success. On the first night Harding received over a dozen curtain calls. Conan Doyle was equally magnanimous in his praise.
Conan Doyle never fully recovered from having his fingers burned with The House of Temperley. After recouping his loses with The Speckled Band, according to John Dickson Carr, he remarked to a reporter that his play-writing days were over. And ostensibly they were. A Sherlock Holmes drama The Crown Diamond appeared at the Coliseum in 1921 and was fashioned into The Mazarin Stone, one of that odd pair of Holmes stories told in the third person — the other being His Last Bow. However apart from this 'Evening with Sherlock Holmes' as it was billed, Conan Doyle left playwriting well alone. Perhaps he made the right decision for, despite some success, he never really conquered the stage. Maybe part of the trouble was that all his plays were adaptations of one sort or another. He never created a purely original piece. Also his writing was in the manner of the productions he had enjoyed in his youth, those that appealed to the eye and heart and did nor engage the intellect. He seemed to take no note of the changing direction of drama in the late 19th and early 20th century which was determined by the works of Ibsen and Chekov. He was not alone in this, for it is fair to say that with but a few exceptions like the works of Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw and some of Barrie's plays, very little English drama from this period survives today.
Conan Doyle was no doubt attracted to the theatre because it gave shape, substance, flesh and blood to his writing which he once observed 'the anaemic page' failed to do. Here he was underrating the power of his prose for it was in the world of novels and short stories where Conan Doyle really excelled and was able to create a most potent magic. However his forays into drama reveal the breadth of his versatility and vision as a writer. In his autobiography he observed: 'Plays are ephemeral, however good'
, and towards the end of his life he wrote in a letter to a friend that he thought of the theatre as The Land of Shadows. Certainly such a land would be far too chimerical for so robust and vibrant a force as Arthur Conan Doyle.
(1) It will be remembered that it was outside the Lyceum Theatre, the third Pillar from the left, that Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Watson and Mary Morstan were met by Thaddeus Sholto's servant who led them deeper into the mystery of 'The Sign of Four.'
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
