Freud play could be darker, more vibrant
The penultimate production in the Harold Green Jewish Theatre’s season is a sedate, heady affair: Mark St. Germain’s 2009 play about an imagined meeting between the English author C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud, only weeks before the Austrian psychoanalyst’s death by assisted suicide.
Lewis is best known today as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, but he was also a devout Christian and theologian who struggled throughout his career with The Problem of Pain (as his 1940 book was titled). The fictionalized Lewis (Brendan Murray) articulates this quandary in the play: “If God is good, he would make his creatures perfectly happy. But we aren’t. So God either lacks goodness or power or both.”
Pain is one of St. Germain’s central dramatic devices: Freud (Layne Coleman) is in the advanced stages of mouth cancer and struggling with an ill-fitting oral prosthesis, which becomes increasingly agonizing as the 85-minute play goes on. The other device is the imminent prospect of war: the play is set quite precisely on Sept. 3, 1939, the day the United Kingdom and France declared war on Germany following the invasion of Poland.
Lewis has been summoned to the consulting room at Freud’s London home (sturdily designed by Sean Mulcahy in David Ferry’s production).
He thinks he’s there to defend himself for having savagely satirized the older man in a recent book, but Freud says he’s beyond offending; he wants a robust exchange of views about questions of faith, testing his science-led skepticism against Lewis’s devoutness.
And so the debate ensues, periodically interrupted by phone calls from Freud’s daughter Anna, radio announcements about the war and Freud doubling over in pain. There’s one particularly effective passage when an air raid sounds (design by Lyon Smith) and the abstract discussion of mortality and belief turns material: Lewis opens the box on a string he’s matter-of-factly brought with him and pulls out a gas mask, and they shout over the sirens about whether there’s anywhere to hide.
It’s an apt piece of programming for this company: Freud’s skepticism about Judaism (as well as Christianity) figures in the discussion, as does Lewis’s contentious assertion that Hitlerism might actually be a prompt for faith: “his despicable ac- tions reinforce the necessity for the opposite.”
St. Germain attempts to flesh out the characters by bringing sexuality and psychoanalysis into the frame: as they verbally joust about who’s analyzing whom, histories and secrets are revealed.
The play doesn’t really pursue the implications of the intimacy that’s forced between the two men in its bizarre climax, however; to have done so would have resulted in a darker, messier — but perhaps more vibrant — drama.
Another weakness is the difficult task the play presents the actor playing Freud: the character is 83, in crippling pain and such a well-known figure that his image ( bearded, wielding a cigar) is a cultural cliché. Coleman is too young for the role (one imagines virtually any actor who could play the role would need to be), but costuming by Mulcahy, and makeup and hair do a good job of presenting the familiar image.
At the matinee reviewed, Coleman’s performance seemed still to be taking shape, his high-pitched, German-accented voice sometimes wavering on his lines.
Murray is more assured as Lewis, though his performance so privileges earnest conviction that much of the character’s wit did not register with the audience.
A final staging flourish communicates that Freud may have found his way to the joy that Lewis insists is possible in life; an intriguing message but one that runs against the text’s presentation of the character as an utter disbeliever, and an inkling that Ferry and his production team are labouring to make this a more interesting and complex play than it actually is.