STEPHANIE BROWN draws attention to the hidden labour of the female embroiderers, and how a 19th century replica made no such error
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Intriguing confrontation let down by script limitations
BEST EFFORT: Simon Bird as Freud and Séan Browne as Lewis
[Alex Brenner]
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Freud’s Last Session
King’s Head Theatre
CS LEWIS’S 1933 novel The Pilgrim’s Regress featured a character called Sigismund Enlightenment who is referred to as a “vain and ignorant old man.” It was a barely veiled swipe at the psychoanalyst Sigismund Freud whose almost total disregard for religion rubbed the recently converted author up the wrong way.
Perhaps fortunately the two never met, but their ideas have been brought together frequently, most notably in Armand Nicholi’s book A Question of God which provided the inspiration for Mark St Germain’s 2011 play.
It is September 1 1939 and Lewis (Sean Browne) has made the train journey from Oxford, against the traffic of those leaving London with war looming, to visit the ageing Freud (Simon Bird) in his Hampstead living room. The conversation quickly turns to God. Freud cannot fathom why someone as educated as Lewis “can abandon truth and embrace an insidious lie” in the form of Christianity.
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