The Screwtape Letters

Though intellectually big-league, even the most convincing of Lewis’s musings on faith and Christianity succumb to off-putting demagoguery, reducing metaphysical investigations to fish-in-a-barrel marksmanship. It’s perhaps pointless to call out the forthrightly pedantic for its pedantry, but The Screwtape Letters, purportedly a logical assault on modern godlessness, is really just a catechism for the converted, and an unlikely source for stage adaptation.

Lewis’s best, best-known and most theater-friendly work is probably also his most effective propaganda; the soft-touch, hard-sell Jesusism of The Chronicles of Narnia holds up read after read, something that can’t be said for more overtly missionary stuff like this. The epistolary Screwtape, whose titular demon counsels protégé Wormwood on the corruption of a mortal soul, makes its bureaucracy-of-evil points succinctly but seems oblivious to its obvious critiques. Specifically, a whiff of imperialism dogs the principles of the attack-ad argument; its contorted embrace of war-as-route-to-salvation is the height of sophistry.

Fiske and McLean’s adaptation suffers in turn from the page-bound character of the source. Screwtape has a sort of gargoyle secretary who cavorts around the stage, ineffectively punctuating his dictated ravings; otherwise, this is a classic case of serial-monologue disorder, which gets real dry real fast. But the Mephistophelian McLean nearly defeats the text, savoring every syllable in a truly commanding lead performance. Nonbelievers won’t have their minds changed, but McLean makes Lewis’s reactionary lecture a lot more palatable than it might be.