Holmes on the Case: Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Human Heart

Damien Atkins and ensemble in Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Human Heart. (Photo: Emily Cooper)

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales have inspired two TV series, a series of fourteen beloved movies starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce that coincided almost exactly with the Second World War, and many other films through the years. Holmes’s theatrical history is a century and a quarter long. In 1899, only eight years after the most famous detective in the history of fiction first appeared in Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, the actor William Gillette adapted Holmes as a vehicle for his own talents. His Sherlock Holmes, loosely adapted from “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Final Problem,” was an enormous hit that he performed about 1300 times. Gillette also played the most famous fictional detective in a 1916 silent movie that’s available on Prime. (Newly restored, it was screened at the 2015 Silent Film Festival in San Francisco.)

The first stage Holmes I saw was The Crucifer of Blood on Broadway, written and directed by Paul Giovanni, with Paxton Whitehead as Holmes. It was extremely enjoyable, and that’s a description I would happily extend to Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Human Heart, the Holmes play in the current season at the Shaw Festival, where Whitehead was once artistic director. The Mystery of the Human Heart is the third Holmes produced at the Shaw since 1918, all three directed by Craig Hall and starring Damien Atkins as Holmes, Ric Reid as Watson and Claire Jullien as Holmes’s unassailable landlady, Mrs. Hudson. (I didn’t see either The Hound of the Baskervilles or Sherlock Holmes and the Raven’s Curse.)

Shaw Entertainments: The Ladykillers and Getting Married

Chick Reid and Damien Atkins in The Ladykillers at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. (Photo: David Cooper)

Performed by overlapping ensembles, The Ladykillers and Getting Married, comedies of very different stripes, are the most sheerly enjoyable shows I saw at the Shaw Festival this season. The Ladykillers is Graham Linehan’s 2011 stage version of the screenplay William Rose wrote for the beloved Ealing comedy from 1955, starring Alec Guinness – fitted out with hilarious fake incisors that made him look like a cadaverous shark – as the brains of a gang of robbers who work out of his rented room in an innocent silver-haired widow’s house fronting a railroad track. (The Coen Brothers remade it in 2004, with Tom Hanks in the Guinness part.) Getting Married is a George Bernard Shaw comedy of manners that’s little known, at least outside Niagara-on-the-Lake, where the festival has performed it on four previous occasions.