The Great Divorce performed by Anthony Lawton

The Great Divorce has been performed at various events since 2006.  I’ve not had the opportunity to see it yet, as I would have to travel a great deal from Michigan in order to see it.  But for those who can get to a performance in Philadelphia, I have heard that it comes highly recommended by Lewis fans around the world.

The Great Divorce
Limited engagement – back by popular demand!
Based on the novel by C.S. LEWIS
Adapted and Performed by ANTHONY LAWTON
December 26, 2008 – January 4, 2009

Lewis’ own favorite among his works, The Great Divorce is the story of Clive, a hapless professor, and the motley band of malcontents who join him on a very curious bus ride. Journeying between Hell and Heaven, Clive crosses a surprising, wildly inventive landscape drawn by Lewis’ philosophical imagination. Satirical and comic, The Great Divorce is a wondrous ride filled with dazzling insight and language.

Tickets are $40 ($35 for subscribers)
Call 215.829.0395 or order online

Running Time
90 minutes, no intermission
Here is a trailer for the Magis Theatre version of The Great Divorce.
-via The C.S. Lewis Foundation Blog

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Charn_Tim had the pleasure of going to the C.S. Lewis Foundation’s summer conference this year, and I asked him to write a little bit about his experience. He writes:

The C.S. Lewis Foundation held its triennial 2 week major international conference, Oxbridge Summer Institute, from July 28th to August 11th at Oxford and Cambridge Universities in England. About three hundred attendees from varied backgrounds gathered at Oxbridge for a time of fellowship and nourishment of mind, body, and spirit with renowned scholars from the arts and sciences, preachers, business professionals, and literary, visual, and performing artists. Throughout the two week institute these scholars, artists, and professionals addressed this year’s conference theme “The Self and the Search for Meaning” from unique perspectives.

In addition to dynamic teaching, attendees experienced grand artistic performances, including an evensong at the ancient and prestigious Ely Cathedral, a dramatic solo version of Lewis’s classic The Great Divorce by professional actor Tony Lawton, and a full scale orchestral performance with the Institute’s choir. Also offered was a guided tour of C.S. Lewis’ Oxford home, called the Kilns, which has been rebuilt and maintained by the C.S. Lewis Foundation and has now been converted to the C.S. Lewis study center.

Even if one did not participate in Oxbridge 2008, it is still possible to experience some of the great teaching and performances, because all sessions were recorded and will be appearing on the Oxbridge 2008 website within the next month. Furthermore, original papers read in the afternoon academic paper sessions will be submitted to the C.S. Lewis Foundation’s online journal, In Pursuit of Truth, with many expected to appear in upcoming journal issues. And watch for the next Oxbridge Summer Institute, expected in 2011!

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Perelandra Project writes: The Oxford C.S. Lewis Society and the Donald Swann Estate are planning a production of PERELANDRA the Opera.

Music: Donald Swann
Libretto: David Marsh
Based on the book by C.S. Lewis

To be performed in its original, three-act version as a ‘theatrical oratorio’.

Place: Oxford, England
Dates: June 2009 (exact dates to be confirmed)

The performance run will be accompanied by a two-day international colloquium on PERELANDRA (book and opera).

Please visit this website regularly for news about the production and the colloquium, and for the announcement of a PERELANDRA art competition.

Join the Facebook Group The Perelandra Project for discussion and updates.

For more information, or to discuss ways of getting involved in the project, please contact the production team.

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It would be very hard to think about playing the devil in a play. In “The Screwtape Letters” which began showing in Washington, D.C. on April 17th and ran through May 18th, Max McLean played the lead character from the C.S. Lewis’ book with the same title. Mr. McLean sat down with The Christian Post and chatted about how he felt about playing a devil and what he thinks is the most common temptation in society today.

When The Christian Post asked him how he felt about playing a devil and if it was difficult because he was a Christian, McLean said that from actually an acting perspective, it was a lot of fun. That’s the reality of if, but as a Christian, he said that was what had been very helpful about it is that he (Screwtape) exposed in him his pride because he is pure pride. So in order to play him you have got to just go for those places which unfortunately were quite easy for him to find. I think that we can all relate to that pride aspect.

McLean said that what he most admired about C.S. Lewis is that he was so self-forgetful. He could say “What if I look at it from the other point of view?” and that is where the genius of Screwtape is. First of all , it really takes the enemy very seriously, which is of course is like the James verse about you believe in God, great, the demons believe in God and they shudder. That is exactly where Screwtape is at.

When asked which temptation from the play he thought was most frequently employed in today’s modern society McLean said that the world view is that being cool is better than being authentic, where superficiality is more important than substance, and if the devil can he’d like us to stay on the external and not deal with the character issues, which is firmly rooted in humility. He wants us to get outside of ourselves and that is why he wants so much noise that we don’t have any quiet time with our Lord and we can’t really reflect. I think Mr. McLean hit it on the mark. The devil loves chaos so that we can’t have that quiet time with God and really self evaluate our character.

One News Now

Affectionately Yours, Screwtape

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Hey, Narnia Fans! Welcome to “Behind the Wardrobe” an Interview Series with Douglas Gresham. Join me as we find out about CS Lewis, Narnia and more in this interview series.

Special thanks to Paul Martin (The Webmaster for NarniaFans) and to Mr. Douglas Gresham himself for this amazing opportunity. And an even bigger thanks to Mr. Gresham for putting up with a few of my impossible questions. Thanks for being such a great sport about it!

For this week: On The Shadowlands…

JS: What was your opinion of the play The Shadowlands?

DG: I think it a wonderful play, but then I am biased. I have been a consultant to Shadowlands in all its varying inceptions ever since Brian Sibley and Norman Stone first wrote the concept script about 20 odd years ago. Incidentally the play is being revived and will shortly open again in London’s West End. I don’t know though whether there are any plans to move the production to America though.

JS: How did you feel about how they portrayed Jack?

DG: I have seen so many productions in which the portrayals always depended on the actor playing the role that it is hard to remember a specific portrayal. The play itself portrays not C.S.Lewis, nor Jack, but a fictional character based on him. Remember that Shadowlands is not supposed to be an Historical documentary, but is a very beautiful love story based on real events in the lives of some real people.

JS:Thank you for the clarification that The Shadowlands is not a historical documentary. In a class I took in college it was, more or less, portrayed as a historical documentary to us.

DG: It was never intended to be so, and I would have though that it is pretty obvious. After all there are only four characters based on real people in the whole movie, all the rest are entirely fictional.

JS: Have most people mistaken the play for a historical documentary?

DG: I don’t think so, I haven’t come across too many folk who have.

JS: Notably one of the major differences was the absence of your brother David. How did you feel about this change?

DG: This change was made for very straightforward theatrical and dramatic reasons and so when I fully understood the reasons I had no problem with it.

JS: Would you be able to elaborate a bit on what the theatrical and dramatic reasons for the exclusion of your brother from the play were?

DG: It is very simple really, first, if you have two children each reacting differently to the same situations, you automatically have two subplots. In the first TV version of Shadowlands this was done, and on studying it later, it was discovered that having the two subplots actually detracted from the main theme of the piece rather than complementing it, so it was decided to drop one child for the Stage play version. Also contributing to that decision was the fact that for stage work each child character has to be played by two child actors as there are legal restrictions on how many performances a child actor may make without a break. This was seen to work very well and thus for Dick Attenborough’s version the one child policy was adhered to.

JS: How about some of the other changes they made to the story? For example Lewis driving, your character asking for Jack to sign a copy of Magician’s Nephew, of Jack as a Roman Catholic.

DG: As far as I know Jack was never portrayed as a Roman Catholic, but as for the rest I didn’t care hoot.

JS: How did you feel about Anthony Hopkins’s and Debra Winger’s portrayals of Jack and Joy in the film version?

DG: Tony was faithfully presenting the role he found in the screenplay, and not trying to be C.S.Lewis or Jack, and I think that is a pity because I think Tony could have portrayed the real Jack very well indeed. Debra on the other hand was superb as my mother. However if one is going to talk about the film, one has to say that Dick Attenborough is one of the finest directors ever to walk the planet (and one of the finest English Gentlemen as well) , and his fine touch and gentle hand made what I consider to be a classic movie with which I am very proud to have been associated.

JS: How well did Joseph Mazzello do at portraying you in the film?

DG: Very well indeed, but as I told him on set one day, for him it was easy, after all he had a script to follow, I had to ad-lib the whole thing.

JS: The funny thing for me with the film of “The Shadowlands” is that I forever associated both director Richard Attenborough and Joseph Mazzello with their roles as John Hammond and Tim Murphy in Steven Speilberg’s Jurassic Park.

DG: Knowing them both personally made a big difference I suppose.

JS: Though it could be worse. I even had a friend who had a hard time watching the film as she associated Anthony Hopkins with Hannibal Lecter!

DG: I think that a lot of people had that reaction to him in Remains of the Day rather than in Shadowlands, but I know what you mean.

JS: Have you ever considered playing Jack in a production of The Shadowlands?

DG: I really don’t think I could do it justice (the role I mean), I am too emotionally involved in the whole thing.

That’s it for this weeks installment. Come back next week when we discuss Douglas’s book Jack’s Life , CS Lewis’s unfinished novels “The Dark Tower” and “After Ten Years”, the film of The Screwtape Letters and some other matters.

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Magis Theatre Company will stage an adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ novel THE GREAT DIVORCE in collaboration with Eastern Gate Entertainment at Theatre 315 in New York City’s theatre district.

Here’s a trailer for it!

Big thanks to George Drance, the Artistic Director of Magis Theatre, for the link!

[More Information: Jesuit actor plans to stage Lewis' The Great Divorce]

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Like hundreds of actors in New York, George Drance holds down another job while pursuing his acting career. Unlike his contemporaries, though, Drance doesn’t fill in as a temp or wait tables. In fact, his other work is as much a vocation as is his acting. As a Jesuit priest, Fr. Drance integrates his two worlds with the ease of a skilled performer.

“I pray before every performance, sometimes by myself and sometimes the group I am with will ask me to lead them,” he said. “I dedicate my performance to God and try to focus on emptying myself so the Spirit can find a clear channel.”

On a sunny, cold January afternoon, Fr. Drance, 43, has just come from an audition for a commercial and in a couple hours will try out for a new off-Broadway play. In between auditions he sits on an overstuffed sofa in a lounge two floors above the off-Broadway theater he is hoping to book for his latest effort at combining religious and theatrical expression. The actor/priest is adapting C.S. Lewis’ 1946 novel The Great Divorce for the stage. If all goes well, it will have its world premiere here, at Theatre 315, in January 2007.

“It’s the first book in my life I ever picked up and could not put down until I finished it,” he said. “It was on my high school reading list for senior year.”

In Lewis’ fairy tale-like story of salvation, Fr. Drance finds accessible characters, universal themes and poignant situations.

“His understanding of human nature and how we create our own personal hells is so full of pathos. You really feel for these people because you have friends and family in similar situations.”

Presented as a dream, the novel takes a man on a journey toward heaven where he observes fellow travelers whose anger, skepticism and worldly interests cause them to turn from God’s grace and return to earth, which they will find has become hell.

“We all know someone who is trapped by the past or by regret or by bitterness or ego and these are the things that keep us in our own personal hells.”

Fr. Drance, who teaches acting as an artist-in-residence at Fordham University, received permission from the Lewis estate to adapt the novel as a play and is developing it with members of Magis, the theatrical company he founded with friends from Columbia University, from which he holds an MFA in acting. The work will be presented as a staged reading in June at the summer leadership conference of Christians in Theatre Arts, which will be held in New York.

For the final version, Fr. Drance hopes to engage world-renowned puppeteer Ralph Lee to create puppets of the lizard and stallion featured in the book. He sees the piece opening with actors and audience members standing together in a dimly lit theater, waiting for the bus that will take them to heaven. The actors will then move to the brightly lit stage, which will have little to no scenery to better emphasize the people’s stories.

In the 128-page novel, Lewis makes a no-nonsense case for Christ as the only means of salvation, featuring a character who on earth had believed in universal salvation but is told by his spirit guide that that will not be the case. While Lewis’ works are especially popular with evangelical Christians, Fr. Drance does not consider the works conservative.

“His theology is sound without being self-righteous,” Fr. Drance said. “What he’s talking about in the work is really an examination of human nature rather than an examination of divine nature.”

In this he sees parallels with his Jesuit training.

“What I know of the discernment of spirits is from the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius and they’re about growing in awareness of ways in which the spirit of good moves and ways in which the spirit of evil moves. There are people in the story who could be case studies for various aspects of discernment.”

One of his favorite lines in the book comes from one of the spiritual guides: “We know nothing of religion here: We think only of Christ.”

“In the book, salvation is offered universally. What prevents people from accepting the invitation is entirely personal. It’s a timeless message.”

It’s also timely, Fr. Drance believes.

“We’re at a time of an incredible capacity for self-deception and incredible selfishness,” he said. “We’ve cultivated an ability to justify certain actions that cause so much misery for others in the name of protecting ourselves. That attitude is constantly challenged in this work. We’ve made the universe very small. The book asks us to consider it as vastly as God sees it.”

By RETTA BLANEY

[Check the Magis Theatre Company Website for updates!]

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JUDY BRADFORD
Tribune Correspondent

Since its release in December by Disney, “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” has exposed millions of children to the works of C.S. Lewis and his themes of spiritual darkness and the struggle toward light.

But for 20 years, Tom Key has explored those themes through his one-man show, “C.S. Lewis On Stage,” which he brought to the South Bend Christian Reformed Church on Sunday night.

A desk, a chair and a podium are all that Key needed to put the audience of about 200 in the presence of Lewis, a prolific and wildly witty author who also penned his autobiography, “Surprised by Joy,” published in 1955.

The show, with plenty of laughs, demonstrates Lewis’ contention that longing is joy and happiness. Our constant search for God, even in everyday, humdrum life, is the ultimate joy.

During the show, “Surprised by Joy” serves as a tool for narration and advancement, while Key takes side trips into Lewis’ other works including “The Great Divorce,” “Mere Christianity,” “The Problem of Pain” and “The Screwtape Letters” as well as his poetry.

This was largely an older audience. Many likely were first exposed to Lewis through “The Screwtape Letters,” where Lewis puts himself in the place of the devil and imagines what it would be like to connive against God, “the enemy.”

As if to satisfy them, Key delivers a lengthy and timeless monologue culled from the letters of Screwtape, a professional devil, to his nephew Wormwood — who is trying his best to perplex a human and steer him away from God.

One can’t help but pay attention to the allusions to war, which were relevant then, and are now.

“Pacifism or patriotism. … It doesn’t matter what the cause is, it would take his mind off prayers,” says Keys, delivering the devil’s advice with a heavy English accent and enthusiasm for debauchery.

Key makes grand use of the stage in the 75-minute show, and especially during a segment on The Great Divorce, where a man boards a bus to heaven and hell to witness the consequences of choices others have made in life.

His voices depicting either world become hilariously Monty Python-esque with their nonstop pace and extreme low and high intonations. But he pauses for humor and gets a self-knowing laugh from the audience with the line: “It’s all a clique up there, all a bloody clique up there.”

The use of Lewis’ autobiography takes the audience through Lewis’ most difficult years. He was tortured not only physically and intellectually but spiritually — which continues to make Lewis accessible to his readers, including devoted Christians. For them, the hardest part of the search may be over, but there is still work ahead.

Key’s monologue hints at the joy of struggle, the serendipitous moments that Lewis chalked up to fate, or to traps set by God to ensnare him initially into faith.

The monologue moves through explanations of Lewis’ physical handicap, a deformed thumb that disallowed sports such as baseball and led him to hold a pen instead.

It talks of his father, a man who never listened to his sons, in comparison to a private tutor who always listened to his students even while constantly correcting them.

The cruelties Lewis suffered under “The Bloods,” or athletes, in public school pushed him into compassion and forgiveness, and a logical acceptance of the mystery of pain.

“C.S. Lewis On Stage” was presented free of charge by South Bend Christian Reformed Church through a grant from the Lilly Foundation. Key has performed the show all over the world, from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., to Oxford University, where Lewis once taught. Lewis died in 1963.

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Good evening. The subject of our talk today is love, pain and suffering.

So too are the opening lines of William Nicholson’s ruminative “Shadowlands,” the bittersweet, late-life love story of Irish author C.S. Lewis and American poet Joy Gresham.

Lewis, who sold more than 100 million “Narnia” children’s books, was also perhaps the 20th century’s most famous Christian convert. “The moment” wasn’t exactly the stuff of legend or lightning – he simply had an epiphany while riding a double-decker bus in 1929. Lewis went on to become a great Christian apologist, which soon will be evident to anyone who takes in the forthcoming “Narnia” blockbuster.

“Shadowlands,” now playing at the Bas Bleu Theatre, opens with suave actor Jonathan Farwell mimicking Lewis’ popular series of cerebral talks. “Suffering is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world,” he tells us assuredly. It is a gift to help us understand that our real life begins in the next one. As an insulated, academic bachelor, the man speaks from intellect rather than experience.

But by the start of the second act, Lewis is considerably less sure of himself. Now well into his twilight years, he has experienced real love for the first time. And he’s about to lose that love to bone cancer.

[Read the rest of the review at the DenverPost.com]

“Shadowlands”

DRAMA
Bas Bleu Theatre, 401 Pine St., Fort Collins
Written by William Nicholson
Directed by Jonathan Farwell and Wendy Ishii
Starring Jonathan Farwell, Deb Note Farwell
THROUGH JAN. 7
7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. most Sundays
2 hours, 40 minutes
$10-$19
970-498-8949; basbleu.org

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