As many of you are aware, I wrote the book The Dramatic Moment of Fate: The Life of Sherlock Holmes in the Theatre way back in 2020, and as it says on the tin, the book is about the long history of Sherlock Holmes on the stage. I also wrote an article about the connection in Sherlock Holmes magazine a while back.

So I know a thing or two about this obscure topic.

I heard the numerous rumblings at the Shaw Festival’s fourth foray into presenting Sherlock Holmes on stage, a play called Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Human Heart, but I could not intelligibly comment until I saw the actual play last night. I wanted to see this play sooner, but the earliest I could get tickets with decent seating was for August 30th.

It’s a very long play with two intermissions, and really, there is not much of mystery in the play at all. The play is a pastiche of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s canon stories. The actors are pitch perfect in this play, and it is directed by an excellent director named Craig Hall, someone I interviewed and quoted for my 2020 book. At that point, The Hound of the Baskervilles was already performed in 2018 to much acclaim, and it had been the second time the Shaw staged a Sherlockian play. The first was in 1994 with the original sanctioned play Sherlock Holmes, the one William Gillette made into an enduring and iconic play, and one he performed on Broadway and around the world for decades.

The Hound, which I watched at the Shaw, was fabulous, and the same key actors would also go on to perform The Raven’s Curse, a play I skipped. The actors were enjoyable to watch, but the story itself was a mess. The sets were simple and nowhere near the elegance and ingenuity of the 2018 production. It was quite jarring to see the downgrade, and I am sure the fallout of the lockdowns during the pandemic era have a lot to do with those declining fortunes. The play was off somehow, and it heavily relied on knowing the canon stories to the point of being a walk down memory lane. Sherlock Holmes is a popular IP, but we all have different tastes. That’s not the heart of the rumblings, just the byproduct.

The controversy surrounds the playwright, someone called Reginald Candy, a person whose only entry is on the Shaw’s website, and whose other listed plays cannot be found. The name is obviously a pseudonym, but the question is for whom, or equally likely, for what.

If it is a person, the fake bio doesn’t play fair with the audience, but it seems likely that the play has a not zero percent chance of being written by AI and someone slapped a fake name on the credits. This theory has a lot going for it: if you have ever played around with an AI story generator based on well-established IP with a constricted story bible, then it is very easy to come up with a very similar play. AI isn’t a person, however, and it doesn’t get how to actually write a gripping story, let alone do one in the mystery genre. It meanders and will always be vague. Even if the play is a hybrid of AI with a person cleaning up the gunk and kinks, the net result will always be a meandering mess with plenty of vague statements and clichés.

And if this were an AI-generated play, we can see why it was used: many AI generators are still free to use online, and Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. To purchase the rights to the play can be a costly affair, and when you are worried about the budget, this route may seem like salvation.

However, at least one person claims to know the identity of Mr. Candy, although it is an odd thing to do unless you choreograph an actual meta mystery to go along with the satiric hints. The author of the article is quite defensive of the actual play, but really, while it was performances that were stellar, the actual plot wasn’t very good, and if you had a weaker cast, it would have fallen flat. This cast could have read the telephone book as the characters and it would have been a delight to watch. This cast really needs a television show and pronto.

Yes, it really was a treat to watch the same actors from 2018 perform in those iconic roles. It is a testament to all the actors how well they got into the roles and their chemistry, no matter how big or small, but performances are one quarter of the equation. Direction, sets, and the actual script are equal pillars, and if one pillar is weak, it wrecks the net effect of the entire production. In this case, performance and direction were strong, most likely to make up for the other two weak ones.

The Shaw has remained silent, which is also telling. If it were a person and not a bot, I would suspect they would be working this void up as a mystery in and of itself or at least address the elephant in the room, but they have said nothing, and not addressing this question doesn’t bode well at all. Make it a hunt or clear the air. Either way, while the playhouse was packed last night, the long-term damage of the controversy won’t be good: it is one thing to have a nom de guerre, but quite another to make the biography a parody hoax. It is not just the characters that draw people to Sherlock Holmes; it’s also the stories, and the mystery.

I wouldn’t mind seeing a fifth or even a tenth Sherlock Holmes play at the Shaw, so long as an actual person without literary training wheels or stunts wrote the script — and considering how many Sherlock Holmes plays are out there, it shouldn’t be difficult to pluck a few from that vast pool to entertain the crowds who still love the World’s Greatest Detective over a century later.

In an age of AI, this gambit no longer plays well. It’s not like the Hives and their “lore” of Randy Fitzsimmons, and it should be noted even they did away with the phantom. It was an unnecessary add-on: this cast can pack the playhouse, even during the lockdowns. The Shaw was blessed to have assembled first-rate Holmes, Watson, and Hudson, and the supporting cast here held their own without fuss, and they didn’t need a Randy Fitzsimmons to spice things up. Come to think of it, neither did the Hives.