He dictates to a scampering secretary, loyally embodied by Karen Eleanor Wight in devilish guise, who scribbles furiously and despatches the letters via an illuminated tube. McLean, a large, bearded figure in a brocade smoking jacket, bestrides the stage like a Victorian actor-manager. This version goes to the opposite extreme. How do you put all this on stage? It would be perfectly possible simply to have an actor reading the letters. Lewis, in one of his shrewdest aphorisms, suggests “the safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” This is the reverse of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus with its vision of grandiose temptations. He writes about the power of mundane materialism, the petty snobberies of organised religion, the lure of novelty, the insidiousness of pride. In advising his nephew on ways to win a wavering soul over to the devil’s party, the self-important Screwtape itemises all the possibilities. The letters give Lewis the chance to offer a sardonic running commentary on the temptations of the modern world. As if to over-compensate, this imported American version, adapted by Max McLean and Jeffrey Fiske and performed and directed by McLean, is excessively and noisily theatrical. You can create drama out of epistolary exchanges, but Lewis makes it difficult by providing only one side of the correspondence. T he big question is whether CS Lewis’s 1940 collection of letters, written by a senior to a junior devil, is suited to the stage.
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