Playing Sherlock Holmes

Michael Pointer

Description

Playing Sherlock Holmes contains three verbatim interviews - with John Wood, Robert Stephens and Christopher Lee - about their very different experiences of appearing as Holmes on stage and screen. The interviews were conducted in 1974. At the time, John Wood was appearing on stage in an acclaimed revival of William Gillette's play Sherlock Holmes, a Royal Shakespeare Company production; Robert Stephens had recently completed The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes for film director Billy Wilder; and Christopher Lee - who had a role as Mycroft Holmes in that film - had earlier played the lead role in Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace. The interviews have been transcribed from tapes held in the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection - Richard Lancelyn Green Bequest at Portsmouth Museum.

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781911105282
• Langue: English

Extrait

Playing Sherlock Holmes
Interviews with John Wood, Robert Stephens and Christopher Lee
by Michael Pointer




Digital edition converted and distributed in 2017
for Chaplin Books by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © Michael Pointer and Amanda J Field
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder for which application should be addressed in the first instance to the publishers. No liability shall be attached to the author, the copyright holder or the publishers for loss or damage of any nature suffered as a result of the reliance on the reproduction of any of the contents of this publication or any errors or omissions in the contents.



Introduction
Michael Pointer, author of The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes and The Pictorial History of Sherlock Holmes , both of which dealt with the way Holmes had been portrayed on stage and screen, interviewed a number of actors in the course of his research during the 1970s. He recorded the interviews onto cassette tape and these tapes eventually found their way to avid Holmesian collector Richard Lancelyn Green and (on his death) into the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection - Richard Lancelyn Green Bequest at Portsmouth Museum. Whilst working on the Collection as part of my PhD, I transcribed a number of interviews from the tapes. Those which cast a particularly interesting light on the character of Holmes were the interviews with John Wood, who had been appearing on stage in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of William Gillette’s play Sherlock Holmes ; Robert Stephens, who had starred in the 1970 Billy Wilder film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes ; and Christopher Lee, who had played Holmes in the ill-fated German film Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962) directed by Terence Fisher, but had also played Mycroft Holmes in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and Sir Henry Baskerville in Hound of the Baskervilles (1959).
All three interviews were recorded in 1974. I have made minor editing changes for the purpose of clarity and any mistakes in transcription are my own. Revenue from the sales of this ebook will be shared with the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection at Portsmouth Museum.
In each interview, ‘MP’ stands for ‘Michael Pointer’.
Amanda Field



1. John Wood
MP: What I found most enjoyable was the way the production had turned out so well. Anthony Smith [novelist and playwright who was working for the Royal Shakespeare Company] told me this was going to be produced and I said: ‘I’ve read the play over years and, reading it, it seems such a creaky old melodrama.’ And he said: ‘well, that’s what we’ve decided’ and I said: ‘well I hope it will be all right’, and it couldn’t have been more right. It really is the success.
JW: Yes, it’s certainly an enormous success. I mean it’s the biggest success the RSC’s ever had. It’s actually attracted much more custom than, say, Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream , which is the last really big success.
MP: I never thought that I’d see Gillette’s play produced in the West End and I think that seeing it now, professionally performed and so well performed, I’ve come to realise how well-constructed a play it is.
JW: Yes, it’s a beautifully put-together play. It’s also very ruthlessly put together. He wrote it as a vehicle for himself quite clearly - he doesn’t allow any competition. Obviously James Larrabee would be a marvellous role if it went into Act Five and when you first read the play, you get the impression that James Larrabee is the other part, but James Larrabee isn’t allowed to appear in Act Five - that part is truncated so that he can’t actually compete with Holmes himself. Also it’s constructed like a cake: everybody else actually does the work and whoever plays Holmes is the sort of fairy on the top. This was something that occurred to us very strongly when we were doing it. We found that in rehearsal I had to just wait for everybody else to put it together, then I more or less had to ‘fit in’. But in fact, I didn’t particularly want just to do that, so I tried to interest myself in other aspects - the whole Sherlock Holmes thing. What interests me very much is the kind of mythological quality in the original Sherlockian stories - you had the feeling not so much of stories written for the first time as a kind of hitherto undiscovered myth that happens to be written down for the first time. Jekyll and Hyde is another example where you feel that set of ideas always existed and that Robert Louis Stevenson just happened to give it a form. And that’s what I find obsessively fascinating about Holmes - that he obviously is a very powerful projection of something in all of us, the trickster who is on the side of right; what is morally and ethically right, what is just. Of course in achieving his ends he resorts to atrocious deceptions, and this whole aspect of Holmes as an actor is the thing that’s so fascinating about doing it in the theatre.


MP: Do you see him as a theatrical character in the first place?
JW: But surely Holmes himself is an actor. Not only was he a consummate impersonator of people and so on - in that sense he was a wonderful actor. He says, from time to time, ‘the drama appeals to me - I can’t resist a touch of the dramatic’, but surely he himself in life is an actor. He is someone who never allows the people around him to see what he actually is. He is a very, very concealed person. There are layers and layers of pose and carefully prepared attitude and appearance on top of what he actually is, and that’s what makes this play very interesting. Gillette latched onto that very strongly and we’ve tried to develop it as much as we can. Holmes in fact, by means of cruel and cowardly tricks, is inducing someone to behave in an ethically correct way. In other words, by taking unethical methods he is making someone behave ethically, and of course this produces in him a very violent conflict, a very violent contradiction. He perceives the total falseness of what he’s doing, the falseness of his position. I think really in the end that’s what the play’s about. He’s a joker, a trickster, a poseur - he’s in total control of all the circumstances around him all the time, and he’s only once caught out and that’s at the end of this play. But he immediately re-asserts the jokes and the tricks; he immediately identifies himself again when he says that he’s drugged and poisoned and almost at an end, and he immediately creates a romantic image of himself which will fill the bill for the next few minutes.
MP: False sympathy?
JW: Not false sympathy, but to get out of this particular situation as neatly and deftly as possible. So the girl can go away with a great romantic image of the man she would obviously be imprudent and foolish to have anything to do with. But the way we’ve put it together, the girl goes round that corner too and gets round to the other side first. She produces the great Meerschaum pipe, the one we always associate with Holmes but have never seen throughout the whole evening and which is saying to him ‘what you’re dealing in is your own image, and your own image is extremely sophistica