A Brief Chat with Screwtape

Max McLean

Playing the Devil in D. C.

My colleague Jeff Fiske, director of this production of The Screwtape Letters, first suggested I play Screwtape several years ago. I’m still not sure he meant it as a compliment!

Well, I told him that if we could secure the rights to the novel about how a senior demon instructs a bumbling apprentice demon on the fine art of tempting a young human into perdition, we would give it a go. We did, and now to date we have had two successful runs in New York City and one in Washington D.C.

Screwtape is a plum role—part Noel Coward . . . part Hannibal Lecter . . . part Iago. C. S. Lewis described the process of writing Screwtape as difficult, but playing him is a lot of fun. I remember hearing Malcolm Muggeridge speak of “fictional good” as dull and boring while “fictional evil” is fascinating and engaging. He also was clear to say that in life it is quite the other way around. Perhaps that is one reason film depicts so much violence and evil.

Screwtape is indeed a delicious role. Part of the joy is that the marvelous language I am privileged to speak must be played so it is fun to listen to. The second reason it’s so much fun is the inverted world Lewis creates, where good is bad, up is down, God is the “Enemy” and the devil is “Our Father Below.” The “patient” is a man in need of corrupting rather than healing. It really does strike the listening ear as both amusing and wickedly truthful.

Screwtape is a proud peacock. He loves his job. He loves ruining people’s lives. And he knows all the tricks of the trade. He also loves the way he looks, the sound of his own voice, and the way he dresses. He is the smartest guy in the room and knows it—all drama and glitz. In Screwtape, Lewis has created a creature of pure pride. And according to Lewis, pride is the “great sin.” Unlike other sins, pride is not an “over-desire” for a good thing, but rather, a sin that comes direct from hell. Pride, he says famously, is the complete anti-God state of mind—a flat-out rejection of God.

The arc of the play begins with the premise that human souls are part of the food chain for hell. The demon world is at the top of the food chain and their primary task is to hunt for tasty souls to bring to “Our Father Below,” who takes the best morsels himself and distributes the rest to his fallen angels. Most of the time the hunt is pretty easy. We are so naturally self-centered and egotistical that it requires very little effort on the part of the demons. A little suggestion toward laziness here, a little smugness there, and a “patient” will soon be ready to bake.

The first letter from Screwtape to Wormwood advises on a strategy to encourage the humans to avoid reasoning and thoughts on “universal issues” by keeping them occupied on “the stream of immediate sense experiences”—such as suggesting lunch when the patient is about to consider a profound idea about the meaning of his own existence. Another letter gives a few tactics on eliminating prayer. Still another provides some tricks to get the patient to see a housemate’s personal little ticks and habits—“tones of voice and expressions of face”—as “unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that.”

Screwtape’s great concern is to keep humans away from any real experiences of joy, for that will lead to a real change of heart and produce—Horrors!—humility. A real experience of grace, beauty, love, and truth will take a human out of his self-centeredness and help him see the world on a grander scale. Moments of pure joy make a man self-forgetful and able to focus on others. He becomes more aware of his duties in all situations. He is more considerate. He prays more.

In the novel, the patient is able to meet and fall in love with what Screwtape calls a “silly [read ‘devout’] Christian woman” who is “demure, monosyllabic, mouse-like, and virginal.” Screwtape is so threatened by her and the influence she will have on his patient that he says, “It drives me mad how the world has worsened. We would have had her in the arena in the old days.” The outward qualities the patient used to admire in his friends, who were “rich, smart, and superficially intellectual,” give way to those of new friends who are humble and earnest, who value time and silence, and who work to make the world a better place. To Lewis, humility is the sign of grace. To Screwtape that means his man is lost, lost, lost—and that Screwtape will have hell to pay for coming empty-handed to the infernal table.

Adapting the novel into a stage play was quite a challenge because the ideas are intense and often need time for contemplation. We had to enliven the play both physically and graphically. First of all, we have created through sound, lights, sets, and costume a scenic design that provides an eerily beautiful version of hell—not one you want to live in, but nevertheless fascinating enough to want to visit for the ninety-minute “traffic of our play.”

There is a second important character in our adaptation—Toadpipe, mentioned once in the novel as Screwtape’s secretary. We have expanded her role in the play to enliven the action. Toadpipe handles all the correspondence issues within the play, and also morphs (very easily, I might add) into many of the characters and temptation techniques being described by Screwtape, bringing them to life for the audience. This character, played in our production by Karen Eleanor Wight, is wonderfully effective.

Food is a major metaphor in the play. Lewis’s idea of hell is as selfish consumption on a grand scale. Screwtape regularly carps that today’s humans aren’t as tasty as they used to be a few centuries back, and that the overall quality is “very poor.” But he does say that the food supply is abundant and that “we are in no danger of famine.”

The Screwtape Letters is a metaphor for one of Lewis’s basic theological ideas. As described in Mere Christianity, this world is “enemy-occupied territory.” Screwtape may be the ruling demon in one district. He has ruled effectively for many centuries with “unbroken success.” By exposing him, Lewis hopes to free other would-be patients from his grasp by escaping into the loving arms of the demon’s “Enemy.”  

Max McLean is President of Fellowship for the Performing Arts. He is also narrator of the Listener's Bible audio line, among other projects. Their production of C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters plays at the Lansburgh Theatre in Washington D.C. through May 18, 2008.

Also, don't miss our feature from Senior Fellow Joseph Loconte on themes in Screwtape.

Features, Arts and Culture, Mon 28 Apr 2008