Give or take the Guardian’s Dining across the divide feature, who these days has forthright debates with their ideological opposites? That’s what playwright Mark St Germain orchestrates in his 2010 play imagining an encounter, on the eve of war, between arch-rationalist Sigmund Freud and born-again Christian CS Lewis. Spoiler alert: they do not settle the question of God’s existence. But the only thing more futile than having the conversation, argues Freud – and I found this point curiously touching – would be not having the conversation at all.
You have to invest, then, in the idea of civilised argument for argument’s sake – because that’s all you’re getting with Freud’s Last Session. Why would God allow such pain in the world, asks Freud, a question sharpened by arbitrary deaths in his family, and the terminal oral cancer whose effects are gruesomely enacted here. “God wants to perfect us through suffering,” ventures Lewis, who – under no obligation to be rational – has a nonsensical answer to everything.
The dialogue ranges from the pair’s sex lives to the veracity of the New Testament, and is sustained by a series of “touché” moments, when they catch one another out in ideological frailty – sometimes triggered by news on Freud’s wireless of the outbreak of the second world war. Whether this more or less familiar debate would long detain anyone were it not between the Freudian slip guy and the Lion, Witch and Wardrobe guy, I doubt. But director Peter Darney measures its beats with precision. And the trenchant exchange of ideas between Séan Browne’s Lewis and Julian Bird’s ailing yet indomitable Freud may itself restore your faith – if only in the virtues of cordial disagreement.
Freud’s Last Session is at King’s Head theatre, London, until 12 February.
