I never can resist a touch of the dramatic.

"Watson here will tell you that I never can resist a touch of the dramatic."
                  - Sherlock Holmes    ["The Naval Treaty"] 






Having spent an evening attending a performance of "Sherlock Holmes and the Invisible Thing" at the Tabard Theatre, Turnham Green, whilst adding the details to my list of previous Sherlock Holmes productions, I realised that this represented my 55th such production since 'Sherlock Holmes and the Sumatran Devil' (by Phillip Pullman - whatever became of him ?) at the Polka Theatre in Wimbledon for my ninth birthday. A flame was lit, and now thirty-one years later, what follows are a few personal likes and dislikes in relation to adaptations and new adventures:




1)  Facial Hair


Canonical descriptions indicate that Holmes is clean-shaven and Watson has a moustache. Please don't give me the reverse - Holmes shouldn't have a beard (unless in disguise) and Watson should not be clean-shaven.



2) 'A man to whom each development comes as a perpetual surprise'

Regardless of Holmes' ungallant remarks in 'The Blanched Soldier', Watson is not a fool. I do not like him being shown as an imbecile, even if this in an attempt to provide comic relief. Watson is of average intelligence, Holmes of superhuman intelligence.


 
3) 'The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply'  

As indicated by Holmes in 'The Sussex Vampire', the answer should never be supernatural. Although events may seem to be other-wordly, there always needs to be a real-world answer - no phantom hound, only a dog covered in phosphorous; no vampirism, only a mother attempting to do the best in relation to both her own child and her husband.



4) 'A hound it was....but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen.' 

If doing 'The Hound of the Baskervilles', if you can't produce a realistic glowing 'devil dog', let its attacks always be off-stage.



5) 'I suppose.....indeed I know....that I love you. I love you !'.

It's all William Gillette's fault, asking Conan Doyle in 1898 whether he could marry Holmes in his play, he received the response "You may marry or murder, or do what you like with him !". Therefore Gillette's play ends with a very uncanonical declaration of love by Holmes to the play's heroine, Alice Faulkner. Holmes may be a fighter, but he's certainly not a lover. To quote Watson "all emotions, and love particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind". I don't want Holmes 'getting the girl', the fairer sex is Watson's department. Most specifically, I do not wish to see Holmes having a opium-fuelled dream of 'the woman' Irene Adler in her Victorian scanties (as played by Tanya's sister from 'EastEnders'), as a touring production in 2013 presented. 



6) 'Tell me how you came alive out of that dreadful chasm'.

Please don't re-write the events of Reichenbach - 'the most dangerous criminal and the foremost champion of the law of their generation' fought it out above 'a dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam', and via the Japanese system of wrestling, Baritsu, only Holmes escaped, Moriarty being killed. Please do not have Moriarty surviving or his existence being a total fabrication.



I'll probably think of some more, but that will do for getting on with.