Mors Moriarti

By T.E.K.

SHERLOCK HOLMES by WILLIAM GILLETTE

If Chinese customs prevailed in the West, this might be known as the Year of Sherlock Holmes. He is on the bestseller lists in a novel entitled The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, in which Sigmund Freud allies himself with Holmes, sharing, among other things, a mutual addiction to cocaine. Books about Holmes and his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, already formidable in number, are proliferating with the breeding speed of the fruit fly. One Manhattan bookstore has an entire window display devoted solely to these works. There is only one James Joyce Society, but in the U.S. alone there are four official groups of ardent Sherlock Holmes fanciers. Apparently, the master sleuth defies definition. In a sense he himself is the case that cannot be solved, a character about whom speculation never ceases.

A visit to Broadway's Broadhurst Theater, where the 75-year-old American drama has been handsomely restored by England's Royal Shakespeare Company, proffers at least one clue to the enduring fascination of Sherlock Holmes. He has the mythic quality of a seer. He is a master illusionist of the mind, a cerebral magician. He simply does not belong in the ordinary annals of sleuthdom. Even such outstanding detectives as Nero Wolfe, Inspector Maigret and Philo Vance pile up and sift the facts. Holmes notes the evidence with something like X-ray vision and pulverizes it with weary disdain in a sentence or two. His fictional colleagues may be clever; he is clairvoyant.

It may be astonishing to contemplate, but another extraordinary aspect of Holmes is that, along with his violin, he sounds a metaphysical chord. He and Professor Moriarty are Manichaean twins, representing the endless moral struggle between good and evil.

Lady in Distress. If any of us lives to see a more perfect embodiment of Sherlock Holmes than that offered by John Wood it will only be by some special dispensation of Thespis. Little known to U.S. theatergoers except for his Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Wood belongs among the top dozen actors of the English-speaking stage. His voice is an organ of incisive command. He moves with the lithe, menacing grace of a puma. In an instant, he can range from partygoer prankishness to inner desolation. At the core of his being, he is a raging, inviolate perfectionist.

The plot? Does one tattle on Sherlock Holmes? No. But yes, there is a beauteous lady in distress, purloined papers, low, seedy minicriminals, velvety London fogs, the claustrophobic peril of a sealed gas chamber and Holmes' agile Houdini-like escape from it. Over everything lurks the brooding presence of Moriarty, played by Philip Locke like a Mephistophelean raven of evil.

As director, Frank Dunlop, who has already enhanced the year with the laugh-strewn Scapino, seems incapable of an error in pace, tone, stance or phrasing. He is a meticulous sculptor of actorscape--the distance, closeness, stillness and motion with which players relate to one another onstage. This company is not called the Royal Shakespeare for nothing: to the last man, woman and prop, it is most royal. .T.E.K.

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