Well, this was a pleasant surprise! When asked by Apartment613 to review 9th Hour Theatre Company’s production of Freud’s Last Session, I had heard of neither the play nor the company. Fortunately, I checked out the company’s website and decided to go.
The 9th Hour Theatre Company is three years old, and its mandate is the exploration of issues of faith through the arts. Freud’s Last Session was an excellent choice for the company. Written by Mark St. Germain, it won the 2011 Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best Play. It’s a fictional meeting between two pivotal intellectuals of the 20th century: Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis. Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis and a vocal atheist. C.S. Lewis was an academic and lay Christian theologian whose books, including The Chronicles of Narnia and The Screwtape Letters, were very influential.
The meeting of these two men takes place in Freud’s London study the morning of September 3, 1939, two days after Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland and the day Britain and France declared war on Germany. Freud is dying of oral cancer and is in horrific pain. He committed doctor-assisted suicide on September 23, 1939.
Photograph by Claude Hache.
Jonathan Harris (who is also director of the play) portrays the 40-year old C.S.Lewis. As an actor, I think he nails the part as an eloquent Oxbridge academic.
George Dutch plays the 83-year old Freud. Though he assays the movements of an old man (and on the night I saw the play, got better at this as the play progressed), he’s still not convincing as an octogenarian. He is, however, quite convincing as a man who is in the last stages of oral cancer.
Most of the time both actors delivered their lines with poise and relish. It was easy to suspend disbelief and imagine we were eavesdropping on a pair of jousting passionate intellectuals.
The topics they discussed were wide-ranging and thought-provoking: how disappointment with one’s father (an experience both men shared) relates to belief in God the Father; reason versus faith; the experience of losing and (in the case of Lewis) regaining one’s faith in God; the purpose of pain and suffering in the world (“if pleasure is God’s whisper, then pain is His megaphone”); and whether suicide is a selfish or a brave act.
During the post-performance talkback, the audience was told that St. Germain was inspired by Dr. Armand Nicholi Jr’s book The Question of God and that he based most of Freud and Lewis’ dialogue on their own writings. Yet this dialogue doesn’t sound as if it were lifted from essays and treatises, and unlike didactic playwrights such as George Bernard Shaw, St. Germain lays out the arguments for the audience to consider but doesn’t tell them what to think.
While Harris’s directing kept the verbal ball in the air throughout the play, he made some imprudent choices that detracted somewhat from the production. Possibly because this is such a wordy play (it is really a dramatized debate), Harris has the two actors move around the set far too much. This was distracting, especially since they forever seemed to be settling onto a seat only to leap up from it a minute or two later.
The sound effects for the off-stage dog, the telephone, and the “war sounds” from outside Freud’s study are also too loud. Moreover, it’s simply not credible that an Oxonian like C.S.Lewis would perch himself on a stack of books, especially those belonging to another man. He does so several times, and I think Freud even does so once. Not believable.
But these choices don’t detract too much from what’s going on on stage, which is s a very stimulating exchange of ideas and arguments for and against the existence of God.
Photograph by Claude Hache.
This is a very worthwhile play to go to, especially if you enjoy intellectual stimulation. Take a friend (a good pairing would be one believer and one atheist!), stay for the talkback session, then go for coffee to debate some of the topics.
As as Lewis and Freud say at the end of the play: “It is madness to think we could solve the greatest mystery of all time (in one morning), but only one thing is greater madness . . . not to think of it at all.”
