FFWD Weekly
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| Theatre by Nikki Sheppy Preview Pleaides Theatre is set to unravel a mystery at the heart of Sherlock Holmes’s private life. Holmes is the celebrated brainchild of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the shrewd Scottish storyteller who so altered the genre that he is routinely credited with the invention of the modern detective story. Holmes has not only a birthdate and a deathdate, but a well-developed series of escapades and cocaine highs in between. Naturally, speculation about the murkier parts of his biography have for years fed the imaginations of an international coterie of fascinated writers. In Sherlock’s Veiled Secret, Canadian playwright K. C. Brown adds her name to the list. According to actress Valerie Ann Pearson, winner of last year’s coveted Betty Mitchell Award for best actress, Brown offers insight into a time period as well as a famous character. But instead of attempting to duplicate Doyle’s trademark ingenuity, she builds on an emotional wisdom that was never much at issue in those wits-testing tales. "We know Sherlock Holmes as the hard-nosed, big-brained detective. Some of the deductions he comes up with are just mind-boggling.... But this is a very different Holmes. This is a private Holmes. The play is really about Sherlock and his association with women," she says. "What I find most interesting is that we know nothing about Sherlock’s personal life from the stories. There are always hints that he was connected to women in the cases or that he might have had an affair with this one or that one. Well, this play explores women from his past that he has had some kind of romantic liason with." One of the love interests postulated by the play is Pearson’s character, Lady Carrington. "She’s a very well-to-do, upper-class British lady whose husband has just died.... She is a feminist in an odd sort of way, but it’s a time period where she hasn’t had the courage to directly face it." Brown didn’t invent Lady Carrington. The character makes an appearance in The Case of Charles Augustus Milverton. When Carrington and a friend are both blackmailed by Milverton, an unsavory character who preys on society women, the lady and the detective cross paths. In a fanciful mixture of Holmes lore and spirited conjecture, Sherlock’s Veiled Secret investigates the shadowy corners of that story. "Basically, Milverton made money off their desire to be respectable," explains Pearson. "Lady Carrington had a friend who had been blackmailed by him as well and whose husband had died from the information – of a broken heart or suicide – so this woman resolved to kill Milverton, and Lady Carrington agreed to help. "It’s an odd time period because there’s that sense of honor and respectability and yet willingness to go to such dastardly ends to protect it.... People’s private and public lives were completely different things. And I think that’s a clue to the playing of this particular piece. We have to clue into the fact that not only is the whole play a mystery for the audience, but each of the characters is living a double life." Irene Adler, arguably one of the most famous characters in Holmes lore, also appears as one of Holmes’s former lovers. This Mata Hari-like opera-singer-cum-spy was among the first to best Sherlock Holmes. In one famous scene at the close of the case, she walks past him dressed as a man, saying "Goodnight, Mr. Holmes," but leaving him none the wiser. The cast of female characters wouldn’t be complete without a hypothetical daughter. Enter Violet Sheridan, Sherlock Holmes’s illegitimate child. Having grown up in a remote Swiss boarding school, she knows nothing of her parentage. Any one of the three ladies in the play could be her mother and she sets out to find out which one. A spin on the old paternity question, Sherlock’s Veiled Secret is a mystery of a different sort. Calgary’s own Sherlock Holmes club, The Singular Society of the Baker Street Dozen, will be out in full force on opening night to witness its resolution. |
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