The Man on the Tor: Sherlock Holmes, Adaptation and Theatre in the 21st Century

Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk

Description

In a world that is saturated with screen Sherlocks, what stories do we tell about Holmes and Watson in the theatre? In this paper, I extract an argument from my forthcoming book Sherlock Holmes from Screen to Stage. I employ a variety of frameworks – from affect and adaptation theory, via Freud and Nietzsche, melodrama and music hall – to attempt to explain the continuing appeal of Sherlock Holmes as theatrical entertainment. I highlight the pattern in 21st-century Holmes plays of staging the detective’s supposed death and symbolic rebirth, and analyse the structures of feeling underlying the most adapted story in the canon, The Hound of the Baskervilles. I argue that, where recent literary pastiches of the Holmes adventures – like Mitch Cullin’s A Slight Trick of the Mind and Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution – have used Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation as a channel through which to explore dementia, physical frailty, loneliness and death, the theatre continues to foreground return, repetition and renewal.
Period1 Dec 2016
Held atUniversity of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom

Keywords

  • Sherlock Holmes
  • Adaptation
  • The Hound of the Baskervilles
  • Death
  • Rebirth

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