THE ERA
The Game's Afoot is set in two distinct eras. At the beginning of the play--while we are within Gillette's script--we are in London in December of 1985. When we return to "real time," we find ourselves in a mansion on the Connecticut River in December 1936.
Click image to travel to Holmes Time
Click image to travel to Gillette Time
HOLMES TIME
Victorian Britain was dominated by the Industrial Revolution. There is a reason Dickens wrote of the "tale of two cities" in the 19th century. The fabulously wealthy, upper-class West End and the gritty and grisly East End of London. Whilst the West End girls took strolls through Mayfair and attended high society balls, working-class life in the East End was a lot less cheery. It was a time of grinding poverty, crime and disease. Death was ever-present. Women were subjected to regular domestic beatings, were driven into prostitution, became cheap sweatshop labor or, if they were exceptionally lucky, overworked as domestic servants in middle-class households. Men and women experienced life in , workhouses and the sewers. It was a far cry from aristocratic life up west.
Click on the image below for photos inside Victorian homes in the 1800s
Alex Siefert in historyrhymes.info
"Middle class families, like their upper-class peers, took the interior of their houses very seriously. It was the primary means with which they could put their financial and social status on display for the world to see. As such, interior design was arguably the quickest developing part of the house which continually morphed into different styles. Public rooms in the house were always by far the most stylish and highly decorated." (more)
GILLETTE TIME
Author Carol King describes the architectural tradition of Hartford in the 1930s. “Connecticut Modernism began taking shape in the 1930s, when Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus design school, fled Germany and took a position at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.” Other Modernist pioneers soon followed, establishing firms in Manhattan but buying homes in Connecticut. King continues: “Buoyed by the postwar boom, towns like New Canaan and Stamford became creative hot spots full of boldly designed residences, churches and schools.
Architecturally, Ken Ludwig has given us a different destination. As opposed to the "moderne" style of the period in Connecticut, or even the eccentric mansion the real Gillette created for himself, The Game's Afoot is set in a different, very specific era: a "glamorous, theatrical, and extremely hospitable" setting that should feel like an "ART DECO DREAM WORLD."
Explore a collection of Art Deco interiors in the gallery above
To explore the principles of art deco design,
click the image above.
Art Deco furniture
All Art Deco Radios - All the Time!
FASHION IN 1936
You can explore the 1930s in this fashion history timeline created by the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC
