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Sherlock Holmes from Screen to Stage : Post-Millennial Adaptations in British Theatre PDF

259 Pages·2017·2.58 MB·English
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adaptation in theatre and performance sherlock holmes from screen to stage post-millennial adaptations in british theatre BENJAMIN POORE Adaptation in Theatre and Performance Series editors Vicky Angelaki Department of Film, Theatre and Television University of Reading Reading, UK Kara Reilly Department of Drama University of Exeter Exeter, UK The series addresses the various ways in which adaptation boldly takes on the contemporary context, working to rationalise it in dialogue with the past and involving the audience in a shared discourse with narratives that form part of our artistic and literary but also social and historical consti- tution. We approach this form of representation as a way of responding and adapting to the conditions, challenges, aspirations and points of ref- erence at a particular historical moment, fostering a bond between thea- tre and society. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14373 Benjamin Poore Sherlock Holmes from Screen to Stage Post-Millennial Adaptations in British Theatre Benjamin Poore Department of Theatre, Film and Television University of York Heslington, UK Adaptation in Theatre and Performance ISBN 978-1-137-46962-5 ISBN 978-1-137-46963-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46963-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940589 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Les Enfants Terribles at Madame Tussauds © Rah Petherbridge. Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom A cknowledgements This book has been a pleasure to research and write, especially because Sherlock Holmes fans and experts have been unfailingly generous, help- ful, good-humoured and insightful wherever I have encountered them. Thank you to everyone with whom I’ve had conversations at conferences and events, and on social media, over the years. Special thanks must go to Tom Ue, who invited me to UCL to speak in 2013 and encouraged me to take on further Sherlockian projects, of which this book is the elaborate end result. Thanks to Laura Turner, Max Gee, Roddy Peters and Sam Plumb for granting me interviews, and for your extremely useful reflections on adapting Sherlock Holmes as theatre-makers. I should also like to thank Vicky Angelaki and Kara Reilly, the series editors, who have been so supportive of this project, and to the anonymous reader who helped point the fledgling manuscript in the right direction. Thanks to all at Palgrave for their advice, patience and diligence, and to April James in particular. For permission to reproduce the beautiful cover image, thanks go to Rah Petherbridge at Rah Petherbridge Art & Photography, and to cover stars David Ahmad and Tom Syms. Finally, thanks to the staff at the British Library, particularly the librarian in the Manuscripts Reading Room who would pass me play scripts with a conspiratorial, ‘Mister Sherlock Holmes’, making me feel as though I was embarking on an exciting undercover mission. None of my work would have been possible without the inspiration and support of my first academic mentor, Professor David Bradshaw, to whom I extend my deepest and lasting thanks. This book is for Harry. v c ontents 1 Introduction: Sherlock Holmes Belongs to Everyone 1 2 The Deductionist: Surveying the Character of Sherlock Holmes 23 3 The Homeless Network: Sherlock Holmes and Adaptation 45 4 The Game is Afoot: Hunting and Playing in Sherlockian Theatre 69 5 Playing ‘The Trick’ 103 6 The Man on the Tor: Adapting The Hound of the Baskervilles 121 7 Collapsing the Frame: Acting, Deception and Metatheatre 157 8 Sherlock Holmes Checks His Privilege 185 vii viii CONTENTS 9 Sherlock Holmes as Skeleton Key 213 Bibliography 235 Index 251 CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Sherlock Holmes Belongs to Everyone In the twenty-first century, Sherlock Holmes is once again a cultural phenomenon, adapted into a vast range of media. The screen Sherlocks of Benedict Cumberbatch, Jonny Lee Miller and Robert Downey Jr, in particular, have reinvented the character for modern audiences. This is a book about how these screen reinterpretations—among other cul- tural preoccupations of the present time—have affected adaptations of the Holmes story-world in the theatre. Specifically, the book focuses on British theatre of the last two decades, and the past 5 years in particular; it concerns the way that ideas, jokes and twists make their way back and forth between theatre, film, television and prose that adapts elements of the detective and his world. As I hope to show, stage Sherlocks of the last three decades have often anticipated the knowing, metafictional tropes employed by screen adaptations. This study will trace the recent history of Sherlock Holmes in the theatre, about which very little has been written for an academic readership. But, in focusing on the last few In 2014, a protracted legal dispute in the United States ended after the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle regarding the copyright status of the Sherlock Holmes characters and stories. ‘This means that the 50 Sherlock Holmes works published before 1923 are in the public domain as copyright protections have expired’.1 A phrase frequently used in reporting the court case was ‘Sherlock Holmes Belongs to Everyone’, a variation on plaintiff Leslie S. Klinger’s motto, ‘Sherlock Holmes belongs to the world’.2 © The Author(s) 2017 1 B. Poore, Sherlock Holmes from Screen to Stage, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46963-2_1 2 B. POORE years more particularly, this investigation is able to highlight the ways in which British theatre has produced timely and topical responses to developments in the screen Sherlocks’ stories: the BBC’s Sherlock, CBS’s Elementary and the Warner Brothers film franchise directed by Guy Ritchie. This timely quality is particularly marked in the case of Sherlock, which has a huge cultural reach in the UK, and where the lengthy gaps between the broadcast of series and episodes create opportunities for theatre to play with the series’ tropes and innovations. Moreover, the process by which the world of Sherlock Holmes has been adapted across media in the twenty-first century has lessons to teach us that can be applied elsewhere. In a world of transmedia story- telling and multi-platform franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, it is no longer a matter of theo- retical interest to understand how works which have traditionally been adapted from print to cinema or television might work as stage plays. With productions like The Lord of the Rings musical (Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, 2007), Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark (Foxwoods Theatre, New York, 2011) and the West End debut of Jack Thorne’s two-part Harry Potter play The Cursed Child (Palace Theatre, 2016), this inter- change between live and recorded performance media in other franchises is already happening. Holmes And tHe development of modern mediA Sherlock Holmes can lay claim to being one of the first fictional char- acters to be widely adapted across media, and part of the reason for this, as Chap. 2 will explore, is that he was present and popular on the cultural landscape at the birth of many of the key elements of modern mass media. There is much that we can learn, taking the historical long view, from his example. Holmes’ initial success predated the era of mass cinema-going, and the character’s life as a transmedia adaptation—from print to performance—began on the stage. During the period between 1893 and 1903, when Sherlock’s creator Arthur Conan Doyle declared the character dead and refused to revive him for further stories,3 the American actor William Hooker Gillette obtained Conan Doyle’s per- mission to use Holmes in a stage play.4 A small library of book chapters and blogs has since been written referencing Conan Doyle’s famously dismissive, permissive attitude to adapting Holmes: ‘You may marry or murder or do what you like with him’.5

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This book investigates the development of Sherlock Holmes adaptations in British theatre since the turn of the millennium. Sherlock Holmes has become a cultural phenomenon all over again in the twenty-first century, as a result of the television series Sherlock and Elementary, and films like Mr Holm
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