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.)

The title of the play, written by Reginald Candy, has a double meaning. In the opening scene, four of the detective’s clients gather at his Baker Street digs, where he has scheduled them at one-minute intervals to offer the solutions to their various mysteries. (Two of them present, in précis form, two well-known Holmes stories, “The Red Headed League” and “The Blue Carbuncle.”) Holmes’s insensitivity to his clients, particularly a young woman to whom he reveals the cruel, money-driven manipulations of her mother and stepfather, draws Watson’s criticism; he calls his partner’s attitude heartless, and the two friends quarrel so badly as a result that they threaten to part ways. But then the intrigue of a new case puts their disagreement in the shade. When five human hearts are found at various London locations, Holmes deduces that the perpetrator is his greatest adversary, the fiendish – the truly heartless – Professor Moriarty (whom Conan Doyle introduced in “The Final Problem”).

The play is skillful and it has real substance, though the final twist feels rigged. This is a Holmes play for the twenty-first century: Mrs. Hudson is robust and feisty (and Jullien portrays her with both humor and wit), and Candy introduces two female characters, Mrs. Allstrüd (Nehassaiu deGannes), and Amelia Lestrade (Rais Clarke-Mendes), the younger sister of Scotland Yard Inspector Lestrade (Sanjay Talwar), who are filling jobs women would have been excluded from under normal circumstances in Victorian London. Mrs. Allstrüd examines the hearts because her undertaker husband trained her and she took over for him when he died; Amelia is on the clerical staff of Scotland Yard but has persuaded her brother to let her sit in on some of his cases. He believes he’s merely satisfying her whims; she thinks of it as an apprenticeship. The feminist flavor of The Mystery of the Human Heart is part of the fun of the show. (It’s also considerably more successful than in it was in the Shaw’s revival of another Victorian-era thriller, Gaslight, two seasons ago.) The highlight of the production is the scene where Holmes, Watson, Mrs. Allstrüd and the brother-and-sister Lestrades, in gripping collaboration, figure out the identities of the owners of the five hearts.

Damien Atkins and Ric Reid are a fascinating match of opposites as Holmes and Watson. Conan Doyle made it clear in the stories that Holmes’s mind works so rapidly that only when he’s engaged on a case is he able to control his restlessness, and modern versions have made a lot out of his neurotic tendencies, like his addiction to cocaine. That’s the meaning of the title of my favorite Holmes movie, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, in which Sigmund Freud, played by Alan Arkin, frees Nicol Williamson’s Holmes from the tentacles of his drug addiction. Williamson was one of the few actors who didn’t play the detective as still, rapt. Akins is another: he is so seldom at rest physically that when he is – when a thought transports him – he looks like he’s under a spell. By contrast Reid’s Watson is supremely grounded – as indeed this master actor invariably is. The idea of The Mystery of the Human Heart is that though Holmes presents as all reason, Watson as all heart, in fact Watson’s medical expertise is vitally important to solving this case, and Watson realizes that the judgment he made of his friend in anger, that he lacks a heart, is profoundly untrue. The two actors balance each other beautifully. In addition to Jullien, whom Candy has made into the female lead, the supporting ensemble, particularly deGannes, Talwar and Clarke-Mendes, round out the cast effectively. Hall has staged the play handsomely with able support of his designers, Ken MacKenzie (sets), Hanne Loosen (costumes) and especially Bonnie Beecher (lighting).

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies