Layne Coleman and Brendan Murray in Freud's Last Session.Joanna Akyol
It's a genre you could call "fanciful encounters between the famous," one that has inspired playwrights as various as Tom Stoppard (Lenin crosses paths with James Joyce in Travesties) and Steve Martin (Einstein hangs with Picasso at the Lapin Agile). American dramatist Mark St. Germain's version, Freud's Last Session, getting a solid staging from Toronto's Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company, posits a meeting of the minds between the aging, ailing father of psychoanalysis and the future chronicler of Narnia, C.S. Lewis.
It's not as silly as it sounds. Lewis was, after all, one of the 20th century's most celebrated Christian apologists, a late convert who wrote directly about his faith when not spinning it into fairy-tale allegories for child readers. And Freud, when he wasn't thinking about sex, kept coming back to religion, theorizing on its origins in numerous works ranging from Totem and Taboo to his last book, Moses and Monotheism.
St. Germain's 2010 off-Broadway play, in fact, piggybacks on The Question of God, a popular book-turned-PBS series by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi Jr. that pits Lewis's Christianity against the Jewish Freud's atheism. Where Nicholi, a Harvard psychiatrist, compared his subjects' ideas, St. Germain imagines the two men actually hashing things out in person during an unlikely – but still plausible – meeting.
It's Sept. 3, 1939, the momentous day Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany following the invasion of Poland. Freud (Layne Coleman), in exile in England after fleeing the Nazi occupation of Austria, has invited young Oxford don Lewis (Brendan Murray) to visit him at his London home. The cheeky Lewis assumes he's being called on the carpet for mocking Freud in his novel The Pilgrim's Regress. But as it turns out, Freud has enjoyed another piece of Lewis's writing, an essay on Milton's Paradise Lost.
That humorous misunderstanding sets the tone for their eminently civil – and seldom heated – conversation. St. Germain has written an old-fashioned play about old-fashioned ideas, in which Lewis and Freud don't so much debate the existence of God, as argue over the Judeo-Christian concept of the deity. Some of their points are rather amusing, as when Lewis the literary man asserts that the Gospels can't be works of fiction because they're so poorly constructed. And Freud, fresh from witnessing Nazi barbarities in his homeland, is in a great position to pose that age-old question: how could a benevolent Almighty allow monsters like Hitler to exist?
Indeed, the urgent BBC bulletins coming over the radio in Freud's study (read in impeccable Beeb-speak by David Atkins), and constant threats of an air raid, give St. Germain the dramatic tension his play would otherwise lack. But if this 80-minute exercise in speculation isn't as intellectually engaging as it pretends to be, it does offer a compelling final-days portrait of Freud.
When Lewis meets him, the 83-year-old doctor and inveterate cigar smoker is near his end, battling an excruciatingly painful oral cancer that has rotted away part of his jaw. Portrayed with gentle sympathy by Coleman, he's in a state of continuous agitation as he shuffles about his red-draped, artifact-cluttered study (assiduously designed by Sean Mulcahy). Plagued by an ill-fitting prosthesis, he makes increasingly desperate phone calls to his beloved daughter Anna, who doubles as his nurse. His insistence on having a deep discussion with Lewis despite this agony begins to take on a heroic quality – this is Freud as a proponent of the "talking cure" to the bitter end.
Murray's 40-year-old Lewis, in contrast, is robust, if a little too smooth and bland. But he does suggest the ironic appeal of the former atheist who claimed he was dragged "kicking, struggling, resentful" into Christianity. (That appeal seemingly continues. He's also the subject of a current off-Broadway show, C.S. Lewis Onstage: The Most Reluctant Convert.)
This is Freud's play, though, as director David Ferry's production emphasizes, right down to a little coup de théâtre in the last scene. And focusing on him makes sense in this context, as a show by a Jewish theatre company. We're reminded that, despite his non-belief, Freud still identified strongly as a Jew. The scene in which Coleman's Freud describes with disgust his father's obsequiousness in the face of anti-Semitism resonates even more than the one in which Murray's Lewis graphically recounts the carnage he experienced in the First World War trenches.
Aware of his impending death, Freud jokes that he and Lewis may meet again in the afterlife – or not. St. Germain has seen to it that at least they get to meet in the afterlife of posterity. His play is useful as an introductory glimpse into the minds of two important 20th-century religious thinkers. But given how the God question in recent times has inspired such vigorous intellectual sparring by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Karen Armstrong, Freud and Lewis's gentlemanly disagreements are about as stimulating as a tepid cup of tea.
Freud's Last Session continues to May 14 (hgjewishtheatre.com).
Special to The Globe and Mail