The Herald - The Herald Magazine
You’ll be Vlad you saw classic show
WHAT good can possibly come from jumping inside an old wardrobe? That pair of high heel sling backs you thought might be your mum’s? How come they’re in your dad’s size? Or there’s that shoebox full of old love letters. How could she have done all this stuff, even if it was before she met your dad?
But there is great wardrobe fun to be had. And what’s evident is that the producers of the Lion, The Witch & the Wardrobe anticipated the invasion of the Ukraine in planning the show’s opening in Glasgow.
How can an audience watch this CS Lewis tale and not see the White Witch to be Vlad the impailer of democracy? Lewis, of course, wrote his tale in the wake of Nazism, and his personal experience of consequences came about when three young Blitzescaping girls came to live with his family.
Of course, young children may not pick up the Vlad resonance. Instead, they will wallow in the story of Edmund, who walks into a small dark space, finds himself facing a whole new set of realities and ends up compromising his principles for a bar of Turkish Delight. (Roubles?)
They won’t see this to be a possible allegory for Alex Salmond’s Russia Today adventure and simply enjoy the fantasy story for what it is. But what’s terrific about Lewis’ tale is that he doesn’t project good and evil in black and white terms.
The White Witch, to young Edmund, seems to be decent enough. And Lewis’ clever writing allows us to believe she isn’t evil at all. She’s misunderstood. She simply wishes to survive in a Natosurrounded world and so morphs into whichever shape she feels she has to in order to survive.
Like Madonna when she posts
her ever-youthful Instagram pics.
Lewis also makes the point that people are neither all bad – or all good. He makes us ask ourselves what good and bad really mean.
Here’s a parallel; yes, we love Eve Muirhead. And we’re happy she won gold and that she probably sleeps next to a curling stone. But she also plays the bagpipes.
And there’s Phillip Schofield. He’s celebrating 40 years in showbiz, (it seems a lot more) but he also makes those awful ads for a car-buying company, which almost cancels out any joy he has hitherto brought to the world.
What the Narnia tales also offer up is hope. We learn that if you stick
together, the forces of darkness can be vanquished – although Lewis didn’t anticipate a Boris, who has no intention of sanctioning the 500 oligarchs that really matter, or establishing an Economic Crime Bill because the City boys and girls are gorging on Russian Delight.
Yet, nor could Lewis have anticipated his story becoming a wonderful theatre spectacular, featuring puppetry, dance and actor-musicianship.
And having Sam Womack as his White Witch (channelling her Cindy from EastEnders?) who is always spectacular.