Culture Surfing - Martin Thompson enjoys sheer luck

The game’s afoot at Marietta’s Theatre in the Square, where Martin Thompson plays the title character of Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure. The Charlotte-based actor’s television and movie credits include “The Guiding Light,” “All My Children,” Billy Bathgate and the upcoming films Mandie and the Secret Tunnel and The New Daughter. Thompson reveals some of the clues in his investigation to play Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s celebrated supersleuth.

— The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle: “This is the entire canon of Holmes stories and novels, many reprinted from the Strand Magazine with the original Sidney Paget drawings. The original stories are the primary source for all things Sherlockian.”

— www.sherlockian.net: “This Web portal links to practically everything available on the Internet regarding Sherlock Holmes, including the many Sherlock Holmes societies worldwide. Members delight in playing ‘The Game,’ in which Sherlock and Watson are treated as real people, and the stories are all assumed to be true. Also online, the Baker Street Connection (www.citsoft.com/holmes3.html) contains the full text of the 56 stories and four Sherlock Holmes novels by Arthur Conan Doyle.”

— Acting with an Accent: “David Alan Stern provides the definitive audio series for actors attempting to master an accent. In our play, Sherlock Holmes speaks with a Standard Public School British accent of the late 19th century, but when in disguise he will also affect the speech of an Irish priest, a Scotsman and a working-class Cockney, among others.”

— “Sherlock Holmes” (BBC series): “The BBC series, currently playing on many PBS stations and also available on YouTube, is the most faithful to the original stories, and actor Jeremy Brett is perhaps the finest and most accurate Holmes ever.”

— Sherlock Holmes (1899): “This is the original 1899 stage play by William Gillette, who was the first actor to portray Holmes. It combines two of the short stories, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ and ‘The Final Problem,’ into one and is the basis for Dietz’s Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure at Theatre in the Square. It was Gillette, in fact, who invented Holmes’ use of the now-famous curved pipe, because he didn’t want to hide his face from the audience.”