Winter Words Festival 2023

Sunday 12 February

7-8.15pm

Lesley Hart talks about Sherlock Holmes – A Lesson in Lipstick, Ketchup and Blood, her exciting stage adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1887 classic Sherlock Holmes adventure A Study in Scarlet. Extracts from the play will be performed by Deirdre Davis.

Lesley Hart is an award-winning playwright and writer, including the Playwrights Studio Scotland’s New Playwrights Award in 2011. Her recent credits include Anna Karenina (Lyceum/Bristol Old Vic), Safe Keeping (Paines Plough), and World Domination (A Play, A Pie & A Pint/Sherman Theatre).  As an actor, Lesley appears as a regular character in BBC Scotland’s long-running soap, River City.

Deirdre Davis has worked for many Scottish theatre companies and performs regularly at Pitlochry Festival Theatre. She has appeared in TV shows and films including Boyz in the Wood and The Magdalene Sisters and spent 14 years playing Eileen Donachie in River City.

“My focus was on the forging of Holmes and Watson’s partnership through this first joint murder investigation. I framed the story within a very different context, without re-locating it, to a future time where the earth is largely uninhabitable, civilisation has collapsed, and two survivors are putting on their stage version of ‘A Study in Scarlet’ every day clinging to a sense of nostalgia, sanity, order and control amid the chaos and madness of their profoundly changed lives.”  Lesley Hart