Rehearsals are well underway for the Winding Rivers Arts & Performance Society’s production of The Game’s Afoot, a murder mystery/comedy that features a real-life legendary actor, writer, and stage manager — William Gillette — who became world famous at the turn of the last century for writing and starring in a hit play about the world’s first, and most famous, consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes.
The detective’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, had killed Holmes off in 1893, saying “He keeps my mind from better things.” He vowed never to write another Holmes story, but a few years later he turned his hand to a five-act Sherlock Holmes play, which eventually came into Gillette’s hands. The play needed considerable rewriting, which Gillette did, creating an almost entirely new work.
Conan Doyle had stipulated that Holmes would not have a love interest in the play. However, Gillette felt the play needed that element, and eventually sent ACD a telegram which asked “May I marry Holmes?” Conan Doyle’s reply was “You may marry Holmes or murder him or do what you want with him.”
The play, entitled Sherlock Holmes, debuted in October 1899, and was an immediate hit. Gillette played the part of Holmes on stage more than 1,300 times in the original run and and in revivals over the next 30 years, and the play was filmed in 1916. The film was thought lost for almost a century, before a print was rediscovered in 2014.
Gillette’s portrayal of Holmes on stage was hugely influential when it came to how the great detective was portrayed by illustrators and other actors. Although the now-famous deerstalker hat that is a key identifier of the detective was mentioned in only one Holmes story, Gillette wore it on stage and made it an integral part of how Sherlock Holmes is pictured.
It was also Gillette who popularized the curved pipe now associated with Holmes. The detective is a pipe-smoker in the original stories, but Gillette found that a straight pipe, and how he had to hold it, obscured his face and voice. A curved pipe, however, meant that the bowl of the pipe, and his hand, were well below his face and mouth, making it much easier for him to be seen and heard. The rest, as they say, is history.
Sherlock Holmes, the play, made Gillette a wealthy man. (Fun fact: a London production of the play in 1905-1906, starring Gillette as Holmes, featured a 16-year-old actor named Charles Chaplin as Billy the page boy; whatever became of that lad?) Gillette built himself an honest-to-goodness castle in upstate Connecticut, which featured such novelties as a miniature railway line in the grounds. Six years after his death in 1937, the property was purchased by the state of Connecticut, and the castle — which has been fully restored and is open to the public — now forms the centrepiece of Gillette Castle State Park.
Ken Ludwig’s The Game’s Afoot plays a bit fast and loose with reality. It is set at Gillette Castle in 1936, when the real-life Gillette was 83 years old; in the play he is a man of young middle age. And while Gillettte Castle was built of stone, and modelled after the medieval castles of Europe, Ludwig’s Gillette Castle is sleek and modern, very much in the Art Deco style.
One aspect of the real Gillette Castle that Ludwig has preserved is the many whimsical touches that Gillette scattered around it, about which I can’t say much more. Suffice it to say that the play is going to make the WRAPS backstage team really up their game, particularly coming off a three-year hiatus, but there’s nothing like a good challenge to get the creative juices flowing.
The mid-1930s setting is also an opportunity to really go to town with the costumes. Most of the characters in the play are, or have been, actors, so the emphasis is very much on Hollywood golden age glamour, with dramatic gowns for the women and elegant evening wear for the men. At a preliminary costume fitting session on Feb. 19, the consensus is that no one in the cast gets to eat anything between now and closing night (just kidding; they can have some saltine crackers).
On the rehearsal front, we’ve got through the blocking process, where each actor is told where they need to move to, sit, stand, and just generally be, every moment they’re on stage. With up to six actors in a given scene, it’s a long and (frankly) tedious process, but a necessary one, otherwise you get an under-utilized stage, actors clumped together and static, and people not where they need to be at key moments (if someone needs to answer the phone quickly, they’d better be standing close to it when it rings, not on the other side of the stage). It’s the director’s job to work out the blocking, with an eye to practicality, aesthetics, and the demands of the script, so to say I’m glad that part is over is an understatement.
Now we can really get on with delving into the characters and coming to grips with the play. The actors still have scripts in hand when they’re on “stage” (our rehearsal room at the HUB), which makes some of the business with props a little difficult, but many of them are already going off-script for some scenes. That’s just as well: opening night in April seems a long way off, but very shortly the actors will be told what date they have to be off-script by. No pressure, though.
In the meantime, there are costumes to be worked out, props to source or make, a set to build and paint, and a hundred other details to be seen to. It’s hard work and long hours for everyone, but after three long years away, it’s great to be back. Once you get a taste for being part of live theatre, you never want it to end.
The Game’s Afoot will be at the Ashcroft HUB for five performances from April 12 to 15.
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