Benjamin Poore

The Trickster, Remixed: Sherlock Holmes as Master of Disguise

This chapter investigates disguise in the Holmes canon, and offers reasons for its relative scarcity in the adaptation Sherlock. Drawing on Alec Charles’s identification of Holmes as an example of the “trickster” archetype, the chapter considers the connection between the trickster and the anti-hero, and the different attitudes of Holmes and Sherlock to disguise. Analyzing Sherlock’s “The Empty Hearse” and “His Last Vow” – and their canonical precursors – the author argues that the contemporary Sherlock’s inability or unwillingness to disguise himself asserts his authenticity, and distinguishes this anti-hero from villainous characters. The aspects of disguise and slumming that the canon and the TV series expand upon or downplay are also, the author suggests, reflections of different approaches to storytelling in these two mediums.

Neo-Victorian Villains

Neo-Victorian Villains offers a varied and stimulating range of essays on the afterlives of Victorian villains in popular culture, exploring their representation and adaptation in neo-Victorian drama and fiction.

Reclaiming the Dame: Cross-dressing as Queen Victoria in British theatre and television comedy

ABSTRACT Queen Victoria remains one of western cultures most instantly recognizable figures, and continues to appear in comic takes on history and historical adventure. This article aims to provide an overview of the lampooning of Queen Victoria, her public image and private proclivities, a phenomenon that is now in its third century. It focuses in particular on the strange recurrence of Queen Victoria being played by a man, which reached its peak onstage and in television in the 1970s — and in which Monty Pythons Flying Circus (BBC, 1969–74) had a key role — but which, the article argues, has its roots in the social turmoil of the 1890s. The article proposes some ideas from gender theory, as well as from the history of stage farce and pantomime, to explain this comic trope. It concludes by investigating representations of Victoria in recent BBC sketch shows That Mitchell and Webb Look (BBC, 2006–10) and Horrible Histories (Lion TV/Citrus Television, 2009 —), arguing that while a prominent strand of the former is its nostalgia for 1970s television, the latter reinterprets Monty Python for a post-millennial family audience, directing the grotesque comedy of the pantomime Dame onto the female body. Although it draws on discussions of gender, and on television and theatre, the article also studies the impact of the heritage film on notions of the past.

Staging the Séance: The Spirit Medium and the Gothic in Modern Theatre

This essay sets out to explore how Anglophone theatre in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has tried to represent the spiritualist seance and how this often involves allusions to the performance conditions and contexts of spiritualism’s nineteenth-century heyday. In the last few years, the depiction of the seance has begun to move away from Gothic narratives of encounters with an unnameable evil, and back towards the seance’s show-business roots in commercial entertainment. Anglophone theatre has a legacy of seance plays to come to terms with whenever a medium is represented on stage, particularly in the form of Noel Coward’s classic comedy Blithe Spirit (1941). Therefore, the chapter argues, attempts by contemporary playwrights to write seance scenes and create spirit medium characters are haunted by the theatrical past, as much as by the past of their own narrative worlds.

Writing the Ghost—An Interview with Playwright Michael Punter

Michael Punter has written a number of plays that engage with the supernatural, including Darker Shores, produced by Hampstead Theatre in 2009, and Stagefright, produced by the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds in 2012. His ghost play for children, The Nightwatch, was produced by Pop-Up Theatre in 2002 and toured the UK thereafter. Michael is Director of Theatre Education for CAPA, The Global Education Network, based in London. His academic research has focused on the career of Henry Irving. At CAPA, his courses include Witchcraft and Magical Performance in London. In this interview with Benjamin Poore, Michael discusses his early influences, the relationship between theatre and ghosts, theatre for and about young people, and the challenges and paradoxes of staging the supernatural and the Gothic.

Sherlock Holmes Checks His Privilege

This chapter uses the reception of the Sherlock episode ‘The Abominable Bride’ to begin an investigation into the complexities and pitfalls of representing Sherlock Holmes in contemporary entertainment. Variously regarded as the epitome of white male privilege, or else a victim of addiction or psychological or neurological conditions, contemporary debates about the character inform audiences’ interpretation of Holmes on stage. The chapter traces a history of femmes fatales in Sherlockian theatre, and analyses modern productions that challenge this stereotype.

The Deductionist: Surveying the Character of Sherlock Holmes

This chapter takes the form of a survey of Sherlock Holmes criticism and analysis, focusing particularly on those works that attempt to explain the continuing appeal of the Victorian detective in the twenty-first century. It highlights the way in which Holmes has come to signify an ideal worker, a dream of fulfilling labour, which is as pertinent today as it was in the late Victorian era. The chapter also considers Holmes as an anti-hero, and as a product of specific media contexts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Introduction: Sherlock Holmes Belongs to Everyone

This chapter makes the case for the longstanding connection between Sherlock Holmes and the theatre, and develops the concept of ‘live Sherlockiana’, whereby contemporary Sherlock Holmes plays affirm or transform elements of the characters’ story-world and play with intertextuality. The chapter argues for the significance of the Victorian setting for Holmes adaptations on the stage, and the special appeal of 221B Baker Street. Research methods and terminology for the book are explained, and an outline of the rest of the volume is provided.

The Villain-Effect: Distance and Ubiquity in Neo-Victorian Popular Culture

This chapter argues that in neo-Victorianism – and in twenty-first century culture more widely – a narratological model of the villain as an archetype fulfilling a particular storyfunction, no longer suffices. Instead, villains often cross over from their allotted narratives and acquire a different narrative function in someone else’s story, refusing to ‘stay put’ or ‘know their place’ in time and space. The chapter proposes a model of villainy that is performative, and conveyed through distance, that is, an asymmetry of narrative detail when compared to the hero or anti-hero. Contemporary novelists, filmmakers, comic book authors and illustrators, and television writers repeatedly evoke and reinvent the nineteenth-century villain. This reveals important connections between the Victorian age’s serial fiction, adaptations and melodramas, and developments in the production and consumption of media today.

The Game is Afoot: Hunting and Playing in Sherlockian Theatre

The variety of ways in which games are played in Sherlockian theatre is the focus of this chapter. From filling in the blanks in the Holmes and Watson narratives, to setting the audiences challenges, dares and mysteries to solve, contemporary theatre featuring Sherlock Holmes, the chapter argues, involves its audiences in various forms of play. This preoccupation with play is fully present in the canonical stories, and is illuminated by an engagement with modern theories of play.