I have been a Sherlock Holmes fan (short for fanatic) since I was roughly 10 years old, maybe even earlier to be honest. I remember watching the Basil Rathbone movie series repeatedly on TV as well as any other random Sherlock Holmes films that came down the pike, so this particular play has a broad appeal for me. The bulk of this play is set in Gillette Castle on the banks of the Connecticut River, a place i visited back when I was in high school. Yes, William Gillette was a real person and his castle still exists and is a State Park open to the public. Gillette was the author and star of the first wildly successful play about Sherlock Holmes, a play which toured internationally and spanned a 30 year period and over 1,300 performances. He wrote the play in 1899 with the consent of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, during a time in which the author had all but washed his hands of the character several years earlier, having killed him off in his short story The Final Problem in 1893 in order to spend more time on what he considered more serious literature.

The success of the Gillette play and the constant demand from the public led to him resurrecting the character in a story that supposedly pre-dated his demise, The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901 , and eventually in 1903 informing the public that his fatal plunge over the Reichenbach Falls was all a clever ruse, in The Empty House with 32 more stories to follow. The illustrations for these stories written after the 8 year hiatus were based on the appearance of William Gillette and his characterization of Holmes, such was the impact he had on the worldwide image of Holmes we have today. The drooping Meerschaum pipe, the deerstalker cap, the outsized magnifying glass- all stem from Gillette, who found the Meerschaum was the only pipe he could hold in his mouth onstage which wouldn't block his face from the audience or bounce around while he spoke, the large magnifying glass- so the audience in the rear of the theater would see what he was holding, instead of a more manageable pocket lens.

Sherlock Holmes is still one of the most recognized fictional characters worldwide having spawned multiple TV adaptations, radio adaptations, films, plays (even a musical) and countless literary pastiches making use of the character. His significance is best described in a poem by Vincent Starrett:

221B

Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game’s afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears–
Only those things the heart believes are true.

A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.

Toby Hessenauer
Director