Introduction

If you are new to the story, or enjoy surprises, then read the play first.

I started work on this adaptation in the Autumn of 1994. The original inspiration came not from the novel itself, (though this had been a firm favourite since my teenage years) but from a particular place; Brimham Rocks in North Yorkshire. Owned by the National Trust, this eerie landscape of moorland, rock formations and twisted trees has a low profile in touristic terms. The truth is that it receives more than enough visits from those in-the-know and could not cope with the flood of day-trippers it would surely attract were its fame more widely publicised.

Since 1990 I had been directing an eccentric theatre company dedicated to performing classic tales in atmospheric locations. My first experiment was to stage The Tempest on a tidal island in the Dee estuary, stranding actors and audience for six hours at a time, while the story unfolded around various locations - a beach, a cave, a clifftop; the movement of the sea being integral to the action. When I discovered Brimham Rocks, it at once reminded me of Dartmoor - yet more like a concentrated, film-set version of Dartmoor. I knew then that I would have to look at adapting Conan Doyle’s wonderful story for performances in this fabulous place, with its large, gothic farmhouse standing in for Baskerville Hall.

Having already cut my teeth on transforming a Victorian novel into a stage play with Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders in 1991, I knew of the pitfalls and challenges that awaited me. These two stories brought with them the same strength; an over-riding sense of place. In the former it was the working Dorset woodlands; in the latter the wilds of Devon’s impressive uplands. The presentation of interior scenes had proved “problematic” (in the words of one reviewer) for The Woodlanders, so I sought a way of setting everything in an open-air location in and around Baskerville Moor, that central, brooding presence of the story. This immediately brought a “cut-to-the-chase” urgency to the narrative, which I liked. The novel’s slow build-up of episodes in London and Southampton was jettisoned in favour of an entertaining first scene set at a country fair; this puts across everything we needed to know about the legend of The Hound, before being swiftly introduced to the perils of Dartmoor.

Next I realised that, in order for this thing to work, both as a thriller and as a manageable piece of theatre spread across a square mile of Yorkshire moorland, I needed to draw a large map of Conan Doyle’s landscape. This I then populated with plasticine figures to represent the cast of characters. The modelling in itself was a fascinating process as I physically moulded, (albeit very crudely) the forms of people I was yet to dramatise with any words. The map was not a map of Brimham, as the production itself was destined to tour to a number of similar venues, but it was a diagram that enabled me to make sense of the machinations in the story. As I moved the figures over the table, mirroring the action of the tale, intriguing meetings were made possible, some of which made it into the finished product. I felt very much like a Victorian child playing with a set of tin soldiers or with a toy theatre.

There were the obvious set pieces from the novel which were a sheer joy to dramatise - Stapleton’s chase with the butterfly net, for example, which involved the actor in question starting his entrance from a quarter-of-a-mile away across the heather. In the second half, with darkness falling all around, the signal light from the house is answered by Selden’s flash out on the moor. When this was staged at Peel Castle on the Isle of Man, “Selden” was a good half-mile away on the dusky hillside, drawing an audible gasp from the audience.

There were other forces in the story helping to pull all of the action into the open air. Sir Henry, being a man of the wild frontier, enjoys the fresh environs of his estate far more than the dusty confines of his inherited pile and so conducts his social entertaining at a tea party in his garden. This, located on the very edge of the moor, is much to the staid Mrs. Barrymore’s disdain and Doctor Watson’s anxiety. Laura Lyons is transformed from a typist, (in the novel) to a florist, (in the play), giving another pretext for setting a scene outside, with the moor surrounding the action. Murphy the gypsy horse-dealer, who only gets a brief name-check from Conan Doyle, becomes a key figure in the action, linking isolated pieces of action and somehow being a human embodiment of the genius loci. The moor might be “sparsely inhabited”, but there is always some figure moving across the scene, some vaguely suspicious activity going on.

Another indoors-to-outdoors twist was in dramatising the famous episode where the “stranger” living in one of the prehistoric huts is revealed to be none other than Holmes himself, keeping an eye on the action. In the novel, Watson wanders into the empty hut and sits in wait, with his revolver at the ready. Dramatically, the audience is “with” Watson, not Holmes, so it made better stage-sense to engineer the denouement by putting Holmes in the hut, with Watson outside, alongside the spectators. Instead of waiting, he takes Murphy hostage in order coax the inhabitant to show himself. He is shocked that it is not Mr. Barrymore who emerges...

Which brings us to my strange treatment of The Barrymores. A play can develop by a series of happy accidents - and I am a great believer in being “open to the hand of chance”, as I like to put it; it was, after all, an actor who first gave Holmes a curly pipe, so as not to have his hand obscure his face. Sometime before the start of rehearsals I got a phone call. Steve Grihault, the actor lined up to play Barrymore, had got an offer from elsewhere that he simply could not refuse on financial grounds, but this would mean his pulling out of “The Hound”. During the course of our rambling conversation I excitedly dropped Mr. Barrymore from the story, realising as I did so that I was solving a number of other issues within the play to do with tension and suspense. Steve’s predicament was a blessing in disguise. Of course, we wanted the audience to still expect Mr. Barrymore’s appearance at any moment, so included him in the cast list along with a photo of myself, bearded, and the name “Justin Mire” for the actor playing him. A short biography went on to list a series of other characters that Justin Mire had played for various companies, including the title role in Waiting for Godot. Barrymore’s removal adds to his wife’s ongoing anxieties, fuels her suspicions about this strange man Watson and also opens the door to the inclusion of a housemaid, Symonds. She now provides some comic relief and becomes an impish go-between for Sir Henry and his difficult housekeeper.

While there are many such changes in detail to the story as presented in the novel, the bones of it are the same, though concentrated into roughly three hours of dramatic action.

The play has been produced four times, to date, as a piece of open-air promenade theatre, but there is absolutely no reason why it should not work on an indoor stage. Indeed, my first public presentation of the work was with costume only, on a bare stage, in front of an invited audience. The principle aim of the exercise was to ascertain whether we had got the story-telling right, but at the same time it became clear that the play would work very nicely on a simple staging to suggest the moor, with only a few added extras to further identify Sir Henry’s garden, the prehistoric hut, etc. This frees any designer from the difficult task of having to switch between Baker Street, Dartmoor, Southampton and Baskerville Hall’s interior; normally quite a tall order. With the clutter gone, the company can then concentrate on what really makes the piece work as a theatre play - the wonderful, eccentric characters.

For indoor staging purposes, the opening scene should be set in a Victorian music hall theatre; the large canvas backdrop map of Dartmoor is then flown out, or otherwise removed, to reveal “the real thing” behind. Small additions are then all that is needed to set the individual scenes.

Finally, to one puzzling change of detail, and the only one which seemed of concern to a visitation from the Sherlock Holmes Society at an early performance of the play: Why does Beryl Stapleton appear as “Christina” in my version? Actors, even highly professional ones, are too easily prone to fits of giggles. “Beryl!” for some reason, proved to be a name too comical for a drowning man to call on in distress, (see the closing of the play) and so it had to change. A small price to pay for straight faces.

Simon Corble, July 2012.