On Stage

...The best that can be said for both versions is that they take off from an interesting hypothesis (first suggested by Dorothy L. Sayers in 1935): that Dr...

...Marowitz' superadditions are for the most part as arbitrary as his inexplicable moving of the Watson flat to the third floor of 221B, or his replacement of the hypo Holmes used to inject his 7 per cent solution by an opium pipe (perhaps opium was deemed freer of unwanted associations than cocaine in the neighborhoods of Hollywood Boulevard and 42nd Street...

...In The Adventure of the Creeping Man Dr...

...In the program notes for the 1974 London production, Matthew Lang was described as a painter born in Sheffield, educated on scholarship in the United States at the University of Maryland, and at the time living in a "converted stable" in the South of France...

...Watson is made to sleep in the cellar for 18 months by Mr...

...The convention, if not the conviction, is that Dr...

...Holmes...

...Watson a hundred years ago: "Honestly, 1 cannot congratulate you upon it...

...Watson...

...But did Holmes in fact exist...

...Unfortunately, Barzun's advice came a few years too late for the shadowy Matthew Lang...

...Watson, in turn, was a kind of Boswell to Mr...

...Watson invented the "221B," doubtless to protect the privacy of Mr...

...In a 1976 essay, writteninhonorofDr...

...If I remember correctly, the 1974 London version wound up on a rather gruesome, science-fictionish note...

...Satire, farce, lunacy are allowed, but likeness and fitness must prevail, in the very interests of caricature and fun...

...Gillette acted in and toured with his Sherlock Holmes for close to 30 years...

...They came to share a flat together, on the second floor of Mrs...

...During one run, at London's Duke of York's Theater in October 1905, there was a special attraction, unbeknownst to the audiences: The small part of Billy, the groom, was played by a young beginner named Charles Chaplin...

...Hudson's lodging house at 221...

...The real Sherlock Holmes, were lieto catch Sherlock's Lust Case at the Nederlander, might have for Charles Marowitz the same words he had for Dr...

...Hudson, and Inspector Lestrade, it was less a pastiche than a counterfeit postscript...

...Marowitz has added a new ending at the Nederlander, which he probably believes is happier...

...Even not so fundamentalist Sherlockians will be offended—and ordinary theatergoers put off—to see Doyle's dramatis personae loaded down with unpleasant personality traits...

...Watsonhad found it difficult to live respectably on his pension of 11 shillings 6 pence per day...

...Ten years later Charles Marowitz, upon reworking the play, put Lang into permanent retirement: The director revealed that he had pseudonymously penned the play, in the space of two weeks, to fill a "blank spot" that had appeared when an announced work was "gazzumphed by a larger, better-heeled theater...

...Doyle, later Sir Arthur, was of no help, having stated that he never visited the flat on Baker Street...

...It is impossible not to believe in his existence.' It was the American actor, director and playwright William Gillette who, after Doyle himself gave up in the attempt, first brought Sherlock Holmes to the stage in 1899...

...Thanks to a former surgeon's assistant known to him during his hospital days and re-encountered by chance at the Criterion Bar, he had made the acquaintance of a Mr...

...Antoon, Frank Langella manages to endow his Holmes with a bit of authenticity in spite of the text...

...Without the shadow of a dramatic alibi, he crudely falsifies the whole roster of characters from what fundamentalist Sherlockians refer to as "The Sacred Writings" (after radio commentator Elmer Davis, the founding father who wrote the Baker Street Irregulars' "buy-laws" determining which members must stand drinks...

...Profits from the play enabled Gillette to build a castle in his home state of Connecticut, where he retired...

...He prefaced his "Other Decalogue" with a more general maxim: "An imitator must imitate...

...Critics have been asked not to give it away, but I can go so far as to tell you that Dr...

...And that's how I happened to see, at the Open Space Theater on Tottenham Court Road, a play called Sherlock's Last Case, directed by Charles Marowitz and attributed to an unknown author named Matthew Lang...

...If all that were not enough, Holmes has been refashioned into a shabby and silly miser who makes a speech over every shilling he has to pay to Mrs...

...Hudson...

...Ten years later, in the summer of 1984, a play by the same title was staged at Bill Bushnell's Los Angeles Actors' Center during the Olympics Arts Festival...

...Perhaps the definitive answer to that question was given by Vincent Starrett, the Chicago writer and columnist who was one of the founding fathers of New York's "Baker Street Irregulars": "Sherlock Holmes is a legend who has come to life...

...Doyle, it is not really open to conjecture, mainly because it is difficult to discuss straightforwardly while maintaining one's tongue firmly in one's cheek...

...Almost exactly a century earlier, in December 1887, London's not otherwise very memorable Beeton's Christmas Annual published a story entitled "A Study in Scarlet," bought from a young physician whose shingle hung outside a partly furnished house in Portsmouth...

...Given that the Baker Street numbers did not at the time go beyond 80, it is evident that Dr...

...Sherlock Holmes...

...Marowitz ladles it on by having Holmes treat Watson like a lowly servant, not only bringing his tea but stirring the sugar...

...Last month it reappeared on Broadway, at the Nederlander Theater on 41st Street...

...A. Conan Doyle had been occupying his spare time with literary endeavors...

...Holmes, is knighted by Queen Victoria, and then quite possibly shoots himself outside 221B...

...The revised, lengthened (two-and-ahalf hours, plus intermission) version of Sherlock's Last Case comes to New York in a semi-auspicious year: Last January 9, the Baker Street Irregulars celebrated at their annual dinner here bollitile 100th anniversary of the publication of "? Study in Scarlet" and the 133rd birthday of Sherlock Holmes...

...It's not...

...Watson secretly resented the way his flatmate took him for granted, and dreamed of revenge...

...Since they had not brought much financial encouragement either, he did not hesitate to sell the rights to "A Study in Scarlet" for a total of £25...

...Watson bears the burden of this cockeyed conceit most acutely, has problems following Marowitz' sally into the Theater of the Absurd...

...In any case, contrary to the opinion maintained by generations of Sherlockians and, surprisingly, Holmesians, the"B" did not stand for the floor—it was added to the address for the same reason "½" often is in the United States, or bis in France...

...Sadly, though, longer does not in this case mean better...

...We are also treated to a new and incongruous side to the sleuth's emotional life: His dyed-in-the-wool indifference (not to say hostility) to women melts before the "thoroughly enchanting attributes" of a young actress and self-styled "ingénue"—although he found her even more "fetching" when he first met her and she was dressed as a boy...

...Doyle used as his source certain "Reminiscences of John W. Watson, M. D., late of the Army Medical Department...

...Indeed, it may have been the most anti-Sherlockian play ever put on the boards...

...On Stage SCANDAL ON BAKER STREET BY LEO SAUVAGE There was a time when London, alone among the cities of the world, offered the theater fanatic an irresistible opportunity: By attending some midnight and luncheon performances in addition to the regular evening shows and matinees, he could go to 14 different plays in the course of seven days...

...Watson and Dr...

...Take the conclusion...

...That is only appropriate, according to Jacques Barzun, whose 1957 book The Energies of Art includes a chapter entitled "From Phèdre to Sherlock Holmes," "In its construction and in the esthetic pleasure it affords," he wrote, "the detective story is the nearest thing we have to the French classical tragedy...

...Strangely enough, Charles Marowitz was now listed not as the director, but as the author...

...He refers to his patient and devoted landlady as my "odious housekeeper" and "that confounded old harridan.' Marowitz has Holmes get sufficiently worked up about her to start spouting facetious social ideas...

...Instead of developing this idea in subtle directions, however, Marowitz makes it the point of departure for a parody...

...Here Dr...

...Since Gillette there have been many other theater pieces based on the writings of A. Conan Doyle...

...So, at least, indicated Watson's "Reminiscences," which concerned Holmes' deeds and methods as a "consulting detective...

...Doyle acted as the literary agent or editorial associate of Dr...

...According to the story's subtitle, Dr...

...But Donai Donnelly, who as Dr...

...Watson complains that Holmes is in the habit of simply thinking aloud in his presence, that the detective's ruminations could be "as appropriately addressed to his bedstead...

...His90-minute(intermissionless) Sherlock's Last Case was a most un-Sherlockian adaptation...

...Scholarly Sherlockians and Holmesians have calculated that The Master was bom in January—a few say June— 18 54, and they hasten to call everyone's attention to the fact that no obituary has appeared in either the London or the New York Times since he retired to the Sussex Downs to take up bee-keeping...

...Melinda Mullins is not bad either in the role of the young actress, who is hired to impersonate Professor Moriarty's nonexistent daughter, and engage in other stratagems...

...Honorably discharged because of wounds suffered in Afghanistan at the battle of Maiwand, Dr...

...Sherlockians and Holmesians—the former in the United States, the latter in Britain (where only knights are publicly known by their first names)—have suggested various street numbers to mark the actual location of "221B," none of them too convincing...

...David Jenkins' sets, while usable, are hardly "Conanical...

...That, in fact, is what I did during the last week of July 1974, on my way to Paris (where most of the interesting theaters take a long vacation in the summer...

...Julian Wolff, the "Commissionnaire" of the Baker Street Irregulars, and dedicated "to the memory of Vincent Starrett,' Barzun enumerated 10 rules to be followed by would-be authors of pastiches involving Holmes or similar legendary detectives...

...At the age of 76, however, he returned to the stage for a farewell tour that lasted another three years...

...As we all know,' he tells Watson, "the twin obsessions of the working class have always been absenteeism and tardiness...

...But there are more annoying distortions...

...Holmes...

...Although it "borrowed" the names of Holmes, Watson, Mrs...

...While waiting in vain for an adequate number of paying patients to appear, Dr...

...As for the relationship between Dr...

...Under the straight direction of A.J...

...Baker Street...