I did not intend to become an author of Sherlock Holmes plays. Then again, Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t intend to become known for writing Sherlock Holmes adventures either. But the character he created is such an iconic force of nature that he’s hard to resist. In 2015, I premiered a theatrical adaptation of the most famous and oft-read Sherlock Holmes adventure, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Entitled Baskerville, the play was a one-off: a straightforward adaptation of one of the greatest adventure novels ever written. When I conceived it, I gave myself an extra challenge by writing it for only five actors, thereby hoping to make the play as much about the world of the theatre as it was about Sherlock Holmes. In the end, this device— using five actors to play over thirty-five characters—gave the piece an antic theatricality that I liked.
Baskerville proved to be a success on stage, so I decided to return to Holmes and Watson to see if they had another stage adventure in them. And if I had another in me.
When I decided to write a second Sherlock Holmes adventure for the stage, I found a much harder task ahead of me. Conan Doyle wrote three other Holmes novellas, A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, and The Valley of Fear, but I found their stories too byzantine for a good play, and none has the wonderful pulse of The Hound of the Baskervilles. I then turned to the fifty-six short stories that Conan Doyle wrote about Holmes and Watson, and while I found endless examples of Conan Doyle’s trademark crisp character portraits and well-built mysteries, even the best of them, including perennial favorites like “Silver Blaze,” “The Blue Carbuncle,” and “The Speckled Band,” were too short for a complete play. With no single novella or short story to rely on, I needed a different approach to this piece, and I made two decisions early in the process that shaped the play at every stage.
First, I decided to change the genre. Baskerville is a comedy mystery—a classic whodunnit, as are most of the Sherlock Holmes stories and novellas. In a classic whodunnit, the heart of the narrative is the mystery, with its string of suspects, clues, and deductions. As I cast about for a plot for my new play, I read “The Final Problem” several times, always asking myself why this story in particular was so compelling to me. It is the one and only Sherlock Holmes story in which Professor Moriarty appears, which is notable in itself, considering the long afterlife Holmes’s nemesis has had in pastiches and adaptations. Beyond that, though, I decided that what’s truly unusual about “The Final Problem” is that it’s not a mystery at all. It’s a melodrama. A melodrama is essentially a popular work of fiction, often for the stage, filled with sensationalized moments of danger, agony, and fear, peopled with exaggerated characters, and primarily intended to appeal to the emotions. Melodramas depend heavily on plot as opposed to complex moral issues. And the characters are often stereotyped into heroes, heroines, helpmeets, and villains.
An additional draw of writing a melodrama was the opportunity to create a play full of chases, show-downs, shoot-outs, and other types of derring-do that characterized a half century of our English-language stage tradition. Plays of this kind went out of fashion by the 1920s, at which point drama moved into the world of naturalism. But as I read and reread the fifty-six short stories of the Sherlock Holmes canon in search of a plot for my new play, I decided that the melodramatic form was the sandbox I wanted to play in. It suits the grand world of Sherlock Holmes, and Moriarty is my homage to the tradition.
The second decision I made in writing Moriarty was to bring to life all of the most iconic characters that Conan Doyle invented in his brilliant creation of the Sherlock Holmes legend. These include Professor Moriarty from “The Final Problem,” Irene Adler from “A Scandal in Bohemia,” and Sherlock’s brother Mycroft from “The Bruce-Partington Plans.” I started with Holmes’s arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty, and their famous mortal struggle. Conan Doyle never explained why, of all his foes, Moriarty’s defeat was worth Holmes’s very life. In truth, Conan Doyle invented Moriarty simply as a mechanism to kill off his most beloved character so the author could focus his attention on his other literary endeavors. I wanted to give Holmes and Moriarty a history that illuminated their relationship.
I created a back story that elates their relationship to Holmes’s days as a student at Cambridge University. Moriarty is a professor, so why not make him Holmes’s professor—a beloved mentor who betrayed the trust of his young acolyte and escaped into the underworld to wreak havoc on London. Holmes, blaming himself for failing to see the evil in Moriarty, dedicates his life to bringing criminals to justice in an attempt to atone. And when Moriarty resurfaces, he charges himself with tracking the professor down to a final, deadly confrontation. It seemed to me that this storyline had melodrama written all over it. The second supporting character I drafted into my play was Irene Adler. Holmes meets Adler in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” and she never appears again in any of the stories. While it is clear from the very first sentence that Holmes admires her, he very explicitly does not fall in love with her.
But a melodrama needs a love story, and like many interpreters of the Sherlock Holmes mythos, I decided to make Irene Adler the love of Sherlock’s life. In essence, I wanted to balance the play’s sensational battle between good and evil with an equally sensational romance, and how could I resist “the woman”?
As depicted in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Adler is American; she is mischievous, brazen, and she challenges Holmes at every turn. I tried to retain the Irene Adler of “Scandal,” but I expanded her presence and have her join Holmes on his chase to capture Moriarty, driven by her own quest for revenge against the professor. This brings her to the fearsome Reichenbach Falls along with Holmes and Moriarty, where the final reckoning of the play takes place.
Finally, I decided to include Holmes’s elder brother, Mycroft, as a character in the play. He appears in a few of the short stories, where he is depicted as part of the intelligence service in Her Majesty’s government – sometimes speculated by fans to be the prototype for the mysterious M in the James Bond universe. Mycroft is said to be smarter than Sherlock, but too lazy to do the kind of legwork necessary to be a detective. He is a founding member of a private members’ club for the most “unsocial and unclubbable” men in London, where no one is allowed to speak aloud. I decided that he, too, was custom-built for melodrama; and frankly, he was just too much fun for a comic playwright to resist. Mycroft led me to the short story “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” which became the glue that held the two acts of the play together.
The wider world of Sherlock Holmes is peopled with colorful characters by the dozen, characters with whom we love to spend time—not just Holmes, Watson, Professor Moriarty, Irene Adler, and Mycroft Holmes, but also Mrs. Hudson, Inspector Lestrade, and the Baker Street Irregulars. I was determined that Moriarty would include them all. The ragged band of street kids who help Holmes on his adventures, the Baker Street Irregulars, gave their name to one of the most storied literary societies in the world. The founder of that society—of which I am proud to be a member—called the Sherlock Holmes adventures “a textbook of friendship,” and this play centers primarily on the bone-deep friendship of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. That is the heart of the myth that Conan Doyle created, and Moriarty is my attempt to give us all yet another opportunity to experience the comic joy and melodramatic pyrotechnics of the Sherlock Holmes legend. I hope you enjoy this modest addition.