Review: The Screwtape Letters (Park Theatre)

When I was young I spent (for reasons that need not detain us here) a lot of time in church where the only text that rivalled the Bible for the regularity of its reading was The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis.

The novel, a series of advisory epistles from a wise old devil called Screwtape to his young nephew Wormwood, who is engaged in the corruption of a human, made a pleasant change from Judges, Corinthians and the Gospels. I always liked their wry humour and the way in which Lewis made such a strong case for the goodness of God by showing the machinations of his imagined opponents.

But I never expected to see them in theatrical form – and certainly not in a show as flat and boring as this one fashioned by its co-adaptor (with Jeffrey Fiske), director and performer Max McLean.

McLean seems to have missed the entire point of the book which is that it is funny and witty as well as deeply serious. Lewis, a muscular Christian of the most intellectual kind, acutely and accurately notes the ways that materialism, scepticism and cynicism all render God’s gift of love redundant and make man ('the patient') easy prey for the Devil.

But he presents his theology upside down, from the point of view of hell. So God is the Enemy, the Devil ‘our father below’ and virtue seen as vice. The text still strikes me as pin sharp and thought-provoking; for example, Lewis' view of the way society distorts the image of women so that men "long for things that cannot exist" is as relevant now as it was in the 1940s. And you don’t have to agree with his observation that "the safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without milestones or signposts" to notice both the wisdom of the phrase and the richness of the language.

But McLean chooses to deliver both text and moral in a way that crushes all sense and most humour. On a set of skulls and bones, and accompanied by a writhing and groaning scribe (Karen Eleanor Wight), he alternately slurs and shouts the words without ever penetrating their meaning. The fact that he unvaryingly pronounces his sign off 'Screwtape' in exactly the same way – with a long first syllable and a plosive p on the second – indicates just how lazy and leaden this production is.

There’s no care or inflection; subtlety and meaning are lost in the juggernaut of a self-satisfied vanity project, that is a travesty of Lewis rather than a tribute to him. A hellish disappointment.

The Screwtape Letters runs at the Park Theatre until 7 January 2017.