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The New York theatre company behind ‘The Screwtape Letters’ promises ‘theatre from a Christian worldview’ – which is worth knowing if you decide to engage with CS Lewis’s satirical, faith-based musings on temptation and Godliness via this over-the-top, grating stage adaptation of his 1942 epistolary novel, written to the backdrop of wartime Britain.
It’s essentially a one-man show as Max McLean, actor-writer-director and founder of the Fellowship for Performing Arts, plays Screwtape, a baroque, silk-coated bureaucrat in Hell. Screwtape is engaged in correspondence with his nephew, Wormwood, an unseen lowly tempter who is trying to corrupt someone known as ‘the patient’ up on Earth and is in dire need of advice from his more (under)worldly uncle. Lewis muses on human behaviour by offering a topsy-turvy view of it as seen from down there, so that God becomes ‘the enemy’ and the Devil becomes ‘Our Father Below’.
McLean’s Screwtape is as bombastic and annoying as the production overall, with its unsubtle lighting, sound and design and the distracting presence on the floor of the stage of a voiceless, writhing satanic creature called Toadpipe (Karen Eleanor Wight). There are some amusing ironies to enjoy in Lewis’s writing, but mostly the conceit and substance of his original novel feel out-of-date, and this production does very little to make them feel relevant to today. It doesn’t help that McLean’s overbearing Screwtape sounds distractingly mid-Atlantic and some of the more blatant attempts to update the story – including a lame reference to Madonna – feel desperately out of touch.