Tolkien could use a little more Sauron, less stale bickering
Play centred on famous British novelist missing dramatic momentum
Sometimes the liveness of live theatre makes itself felt in unexpected ways. Two nights before premiering their latest play Tolkien, the folks at Pacific Theatre had to scramble when the actor performing the title role withdrew for health reasons.
Fortunately, they had another fine actor available in playwright Ron Reed, who also directs the show and runs the company. Reed stepped in to play J.R.R. Tolkien, script in hand.
Unfortunately, performing on short notice is the least of Reed’s problems in the face of his long, dramatically undercooked biographical script.
Tolkien, of course, is best known for his marvellous fantasy novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. They provide a thread through Reed’s play, which follows Tolkien as an Oxford philology professor from 1939 to 1963 as he first conceived, then gradually wrote and published the books.
But the heart of the play is Tolkien’s vexed friendship with fellow Oxford don and fantasist C.S. Lewis (Ian Farthing). Early in their relationship, Lewis championed Tolkien’s strange writings about hobbits, elves and orcs, urging him to share his imaginative world with the public. Catholic Tolkien, in turn, helped convert unbeliever Lewis into an active Christian.
They share their literary and religious enthusiasms with Lewis’ brother Warnie (Tim Dixon) and Oxford academic Hugo Dyson (Simon Webb) in booze-fuelled meetings of a group they call the Inklings. But the serpent enters the garden when yet another Christian writer, Charles Williams (Anthony F. Ingram), joins their circle. Lewis becomes a big fan, but Tolkien loathes him.
Though Tolkien takes issue with Williams’ theology, writing style and personal behaviour, his hostility seems motivated primarily by jealousy. Williams has come between Tolkien and the person threatening its Middle Earth. And that’s not Williams. The same arguments persist even after his death — and the second intermission.
The acting is fine. Farthing makes a likable Lewis. Dixon, Ingram and Webb provide some liveliness around the earnest central pair. But the sameness of these men in age and class (the woman, too, though underwritten) adds to the sense of a world without much dramatic contrast, despite the playwright performing the central character with a script in his hand.