by Michael Meigs
Max McLean certainly looked the part of Screwtape, the senior demon imagined by C.S. Lewis for his 1942 epistolary Christian novela The Screwtape Letters. Portly and with a thinning mane of graying hair, comfortably elegant in a red quilted dressing gown, he was the picture of a sybaritic Victorian gentleman at home in his study with attendant hissing demon.
Attendant demon? Well, yes; one imagines that as a relatively senior member of the administration of Our Father in Hell, a sort of ambassador and mentor to the corps of aspiring tempters and transversers, Screwtape would be entitled to at least one junior assistant. Toadpipe the demon hasn't a word to say in this script but plenty to hiss, and at one point when the word "prayer" is mentioned, Toadpipe has a long and rather nasty spell of visible vomiting.
Lewis's text is a fine exercise in intimate irony, and perhaps it's a little disconcerting to think that it was written as the second great European war got underway in earnest. It's presented as a series of 31 letters written by Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, a new graduate of Tempters' Training. In this staging, Screwtape dictates the letters to Toadpipe, justifying that minor character's existence on stage and prompting a regular bit of business as the attendant demon scales a crazy ladder and dispatches them through a sort of underworldly pneumatic system with a great crash of sound effects and a fiery glow that mounts the pipe.
The Screwtape Letters is an account of a lengthy but ultimately futile coaching session. The aim is to confuse a young human and attract him to damnation at his death, after which the devils will feast upon his soul.
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