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

259 Pages·2017·2.58 MB·English

by  Benjamin Poore

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
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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