It was the biggest whodunit of the summer theatre season — and now it’s been solved

It was the biggest mystery of the summer theatre season: who was the author behind the Shaw Festival’s world premiere play “Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Human Heart”?
The writer named in the program was Reginald Candy, but a simple Google search yielded no information about him, and quirky details in his biography raised suspicions that he might not be a real person. Critics wondered about the playwright’s identity in reviews and theatre circles were buzzing about who it might be.
Now, however, the mystery is finally solved — and the clues were there all along, hiding in plain sight.
The author of “Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Human Heart” is none other than its star, Damien Atkins, who plays the title role of the famous fictional consulting detective. This is the third Sherlock play in which Atkins has performed at Shaw alongside Ric Reid as Dr. Watson and Claire Jullien as Mrs. Hudson — but the first that he’s written himself.
The story of how he came to write the play, why he chose to use a pseudonym and why he’s revealing himself as the author now is as fun and circuitous as an Arthur Conan Doyle mystery itself.
In an exclusive interview with the Star, Atkins called the authorship mystery a “Sherlock game.” Given that his play, typical of a Holmes story, features several characters who pretend to be other people, using a pseudonym while dropping hints about the identity of the real author added another layer of Sherlockian intrigue.
One of the most acclaimed Canadian actors of his generation, Atkins is also an accomplished playwright whose works have been produced by theatres including the Stratford Festival, Buddies in Bad Times, Crow’s Theatre and recently Shaw, where his adaption of C.S. Lewis’s “Prince Caspian” was part of the 2023 season.
The spark behind “Mystery of the Human Heart” came out of a conversation between Atkins and Shaw artistic director Tim Carroll before the pandemic, in which Carroll wondered whether Atkins might round off the Shaw’s Sherlock plays by writing one himself (“The Hound of the Baskervilles” in 2018 was adapted by R. Hamilton “Bob” Wright and David Pichette, and “Sherlock Holmes and the Raven’s Curse” in 2021 by Wright).
A commission didn’t ensue, but Atkins found himself in mid-2020 with time on his hands. “I just spent a lot of time walking around in the pandemic thinking, ‘If I were to write a Sherlock Holmes play purely for my own interest and the challenge of it, what would it be?’” he said. “Then I wrote it.”
Almost three years ago, Carroll asked Atkins if anything had come of that conversation and, with a little prodding, Atkins showed him a draft.
“I just immediately thought, this is written with so much love for the character,” said Carroll in a separate interview. “It’s written with such an encyclopedic and profound knowledge of those stories and a delight in the mechanism of those stories.”
“Human Heart” is in part inspired by Conan Doyle’s short story “The Final Problem,” and includes a significant character from the Holmes universe who had not previously featured in the Shaw’s Sherlock plays (saying more would be a spoiler). In it, Atkins explores the relationships between the three central characters and delves deep into Sherlock’s psyche.
“In the stories he’s described as a machine, that’s literally the word that Watson uses,” he said. “What I liked that Bob (Wright) had done was to give you hints of his inner emotional life … when I went to write my own, I thought, I’m going to go even further and really push him to the breaking point.”
The Shaw did two readings of “Human Heart,” with director Craig Hall and cast members giving Atkins extensive notes on his script. In December 2022, Carroll committed to programming it.
Which brings us to the pseudonym. Atkins told me that he resisted claiming authorship because he didn’t want the attention that would come with being both author and lead actor. “I wanted to come in, do my job as a writer the best I could and then do my job as an actor the best I could,” he said.
Carroll sees the pseudonym as “psychological firewall” for Atkins, not just in performance but also in rehearsals: “I think it helps to have this thing of ‘Going in this room I’m just Damien the actor, and some bloke named Reginald Candy has written the play that I have to try and rehearse,’” said Carroll.
All the same time, Atkins made himself discoverable. Reginald Candy’s program biography is a performance in its own right, dotted with clues to Atkins’ real identity (born in Australia in 1975) and featuring peculiar details such as the fact that Candy raises miniature horses in his spare time. An author photo in the program is actually Atkins, but taken in shadow so his face is obscured.
There’s a deeply personal reason why Atkins chose this pseudonym. In recent years, while interviewing his father about their family history, Atkins felt that some details weren’t adding up and eventually deduced that a man in the family’s orbit named Reginald Candy was his paternal grandfather (he’s writing a play about this, separate from the Sherlock one). Taking Candy’s name “was a sort of nod” that his mother and sister would recognize, Atkins said; his father now has Alzheimer’s disease.
Atkins and the Shaw Festival agreed to use the pseudonym with the proviso that he would spill the beans if someone guessed it was him, which I did by picking up clues that Star critic Joshua Chong left in his review of the show.
“I would be lying if I didn’t say it’s a little disappointing to have to let go,” Atkins told me, but “if I really wanted it to go on forever, I would’ve written a much less suspect bio.”
The upside of telling this story is that Atkins can express his appreciation for everything the Shaw company brought to the production, from his co-stars Reid and Jullien to the rest of the cast and creative team, stage management and craftspeople.
“I don’t mind giving up the game to be able to say how much I love what they’ve done,” he said. “I’ve been there every day, every second. I know intimately how hard people are working. And it is a galvanizing feeling because you just feel like, oh, all of these people, their work has to be respected.”
Carroll, too, is glad that the case of the mystery playwright has finally been solved. “It would’ve been a shame if nobody had ever unmasked him, because I think people should celebrate Damien,” he said. “I don’t think there are many artists like him in the world and I think we’re lucky to have him.”